Lee Chang-dong's second feature film is a lot more ambitious than his debut Green Fish. It presents a story unfolding in reverse chronology spanning several years before a man's suicide. The narrative is split between different parts with time gaps in between, connected by the movement of a train going back in time.
This film has some really great moments in it, but as a collective piece, it doesn't work as well as I wanted it to. I keep coming back to it hoping I find some new meaning to it, but my original opinion still hasn't changed. So let me go through everything that I didn't like about this movie, and then I'll move onto what I did like about it.
First off, I find the intro really annoying. It mostly has to do with the main character's obnoxious acting, but the silly characters surrounding him don't help much either. I don't claim to know anything about suicide, but I personally found it to be way over the top, especially coming from a director like Lee Chang-dong, who usually directs his films with incredible nuance and subtlety.
Throughout the whole movie I was asking "what is wrong with this guy" and clearly director Lee wanted me to be asking that so that the reveal at the end resonates with me emotionally. Unfortunately it didn't. I still sit there confused during rewatches, watching a lot of these scenes. It seems a little reductive to have a person's life be explained/justified by a single moment.
And my final big complaint is that there are no well written characters surrounding the protagonist. The big time skips between the segments make certain characters seem unrecognisable, and as a result they feel shallow, only used as narrative tools to hit certain plot points or references necessary for the main character's development.
On the bright side however, I really enjoyed certain parts of the story. Especially "Life is Beautiful" I thought was really well done, and managed to capture the complex emotions that Young-ho was feeling perfectly. The scene in the car driving back home is probably my favourite moment in the whole film. It says so much while doing so little.
Also I thought the callbacks were pretty well done throughout the film. That way the film maintains a through line that keeps the parts connected, and prevents the story from feeling too disjointed. The execution of the references isn't always the best, but it's at least serviceable, and it makes you remember important moments in the film.
In general I'm very conflicted about this film. I wanted to like it a lot more than I did, because there are some really interesting moments in this story. But in the end, it didn't impact me as much as Lee's other films did. But it's still a good movie, and I still enjoyed it, despite all of my problems with it.
