태극기 ~ Tae Guk Gi—The Brotherhood of War

The movie Tae Guk Gi—The Brotherhood of War was one of the most emotional films I have ever seen. By the end of the film, I could not stop crying for the bitter lot of the two brothers, especially Lee JinSeok (이진석), the younger brother. He desperately tries to keep his brother from sacrificing himself for him, and through this, he is forced with unbelievable hardship, to grow out of an innocent schoolboy and into a mature soldier.

The main theme of the movie is exploring how the bond between two brothers can be ravaged and thrashed to absolute extremes by unimaginable forces, which in this case is the war in 1950 between North and South Korea. Albeit this monstrous force, the bond is still able to hold on until the very end.

The two brothers start out being poor but happy shoe-shine boys in the streets of a village near Seoul. Then, by an evil twist of fate, they are drafted by merciless recruiters to join the unexpected war effort. There, JinSeok’s older brother JinTae (이진태) tries to do everything he can to both keep his brother out of danger, and to get his brother discharged and sent home. JinSeok, on the other hand, is alarmed by his brother’s mindless boldness on the battlefield to achieve these goals, and wishes that JinTae would not risk so much for his brother. The movie then takes us through many tense battle scenes as the South Koreans slowly advance on North Korea, and at the same time, JinTae becomes more and more absorbed in trying to get the medal that will in theory allow him to send JinSeok back home. After North Korea reconciles their war effort with Chinese reinforcements, JinSeok ends up imprisoned under suspicion of being a Communist. JinTae attempts to rescue him, but seems to fail as the commander who should have issued JinSeok’s release orders him to be burned instead. This drives JinTae insane and he joins North Korea to fight the evil South Koreans who killed his brother. Meanwhile, JinSeok is alive and learns of his brother and flees the South Korean army to see him. After a long, gut-wrenching scene of trying to make JinTae come back to his senses, he finally realises that JinSeok is really still alive and tells him to flee, promising to return. Here, the movie comes full circle with the archaeology scene it started with, but now we see an old JinSeok looking down at the bones of his boor brother and crying his remorse about how his brother never returned.

Even though this movie has so many special effects and stunts created to make the battles seem realistic, which are in fact, extremely successful and effective, these are only background effects. They are not what you remember about each scene they are featured in after seeing them. What you remember is the tension and how you plead in your mind for the characters not to do something (such as run through enemy fire, or hit each other), and how you can almost literally see the bond that ties the brothers together being violently jerked and stretched to the breaking point. It is one of those movies which I don’t want to keep watching because of the exhausting emotional experience, but cannot stop watching at the same time because of the suspense and beauty of it all.

Tae Guk Gi is an unforgettable emotional experience that will make you rethink how you take those close to you, and their love, for granted in such an eye-opening way that it will stay with you for a very long time.

준향 ~ Chunhyang

The movie Chunhyang by director Im KwonTaek (임권택) is very unique and interesting. The film, though simple in plot structure, is still very captivating and original, allowing the viewer to experience an emotional journey with the focus of the movie, Chunhyang (played by Lee HyoJeong) who is an innocent daugther of a courtesan. She undergoes cruel punishments and near execution for the sake of trying to remain faithful to her husband.

The type of story told in the film is a stereotypical folk tale with an ultimately good and innocent party, which is Chunhyang, Mongryong, and their friends, and an ultimately evil and cruel party, Gov. Byun Hakdo. It is the story of the evil governor trying to break the love bond that Chunhyang has for Mongryong, but failing and being punished for his evil misdeeds.

The story starts out with a singing narrator beginning a korean story-telling in lyric singing. This is one of the uniquenesses of the movie—often times, this singing narrator will chant whatever is being shown on the screen at the moment like “Mongryong flips open his fan to block out the sun” or “Pangja jumps over the stones and dances through the bushes.” It is rather queer at first but then one gets used to this concept, and sometimes it is rather helpful to explain a scene. Mongryong, the son of a wealthy nobleman, falls in love with Chunhyang at first sight, and asks her to marry him. This must be kept a secret, however, to allow Mongryong to take his state exam. Under unfortunate circumstances, he has to leave the town that they both live in, and cannot take Chunhyang with him. While he is away, the evil governor becomes instated in Chunhyang’s district, and orders her to be his courtesan. She pleads that for a woman to serve more than one man is like for a governor to serve more than one king. The governor proceeds to beat her and plans to kill her. Meanwhile, Mongryong successfully becomes an emissary for the king after taking the test, and comes back to Chunhyang’s village to investigate. The day before Chunhyang is scheduled to be executed, Mongryong stages a planned mass arrest of the evil governor and all the embezzling nobles, thus saving his love and his country.

The use of special effects in this movie was rather insignificant. Instead, the director relied on subtle scene creation such as camera angle and sound editing that made every scene seem appealing and kept me focused and impatient to know how the story continues. The simplicity of this story had a purpose as well. It was to take a well known general scenario, and explore the details that may be used to put it to-gether.

Chunhyang is a well-known folk tale told in a unique style that takes the viewer through the story not only with the conventional film, but with the traditional Korean way of story-telling.

스캔들 ~ Untold Scandal

The movie Untold Scandal, by Lee JaeYong, was very intriguing and an ingenious story, though unnecessarily stretched out. There were many confusing parts, but in the end, everything was brought to-gether to make shocking sense. The main character, Cho Won (Bae YongJoon), wins a bet with his cousin, Madam Cho (Lee MiSuk), but in the process creates a fatal wound in the hart of others, as well as his own.

The main theme of this movie is that it is dangerous to play with other people’s hearts, bycause the repercussions can be unimaginable. Here, it not only causes the deepest emotional pain, but even death itself, and the lessons learned from this horrible experiment are lifelong.

The plot starts out with Cho Won making a bet with Madam Cho that if he is able to seduce a 27-year-old virgin widow, Lady Jung (Jeon DoYeon), then Madam Cho will give him one night of lovemaking as a reward. Otherwise, Cho Won must forefeit his enormous love life and lust, and become a chaste monk. Madam Cho will know he accomplished his task by receiving a cloth with the blood of Lady Jung. Through much intrigue, lying, and secrecy, Cho Won manages to break through the thick walls of Lady Jung’s heart, and make her believe he loves her. But the bloody rag is not enough for Madam Cho as evidence. This causes Cho Won to take more heartless measures. When Lady Jung visits him next, she finds him with another girl, and he tells her that he never loved her. Lady Jung is devastated and returns to her home village to tend to those ravaged by the plague going on there, and refuses to eat or drink. Word of this convinces Madam Cho that Jung really is in love with Cho Won, but by this time Cho Won’s heart is already with Lady Jung. After failing one last time to ask Lady Jung for forgiveness, Cho Won returns home, where he is stabbed by Jung’s outraged brother after hearing rumours about Cho Won and Jung. News of this takes the last shreds of hope away from Lady Jung and she takes her own life in despair, and Madam Cho, who was in love with Cho Won all this time, is devastated as well, and forced to flee the country with a leaden weight in her heart.

One of the strangest things in the movie is that every little prop in every scene is simply immaculate. Even in the secret Catholic meetings every garment is perfectly pressed and every inch of wooden floor is shining. Are the Koreans trying to please a certain audience with this, or does it carry some symbolic meaning to the movie? Additionally, many of the scenes seem very drawn out. If they were shortened, then the movie experience would be much better. What is most memorable about the movie (other than the pristine condition of everything) is poor Lady Jung and how her heart was completely shattered by a careless Cho Won.

Though mostly geared for women, Untold Scandal is an entertaining and fascinating rendition of the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos that highlights the importance of keeping a game involving people’s hearts from getting out of hand.

Korean Film ~ A Spectrum of Emotion

In The Art of Watching Films ~ Sixth Edition by Boggs and Petrie, we are introduced to the theory that “This manipulation [of emotions] myst be honest and appropriate to the story. Usually we reject as sentimental films that overuse emotional material. Such films might even make us lugh when we’re supposed to cry. So a filmmaker must exercise restraint,” (49). So if a movie has either more or less emotional restraint than prescribed by the authors, the movie will either become silly or bland, and the audience will not take it seriously. Although this statement can be true for many movies that have failed by doing just that, we are led to question whether this theory is really true for all cases. Though The Art of Watching Films is tells us that it is impossible to expand the horizons of emotion, this is not at all an impossible task, as some ingenious directors working in South Korea have demonstrated. These directors stretch the boundaries of emotion and emotional restraint in their films, but despite that, are able to make captivating and memorable movies that keep the audiences coming back for more.

The quantity of emotion used in some Korean films is so copious that it would obviously make the audience receive it as ridiculous. But in actuality, it only serves to make the film stronger. This is an element of the film Jibeuro ~ The Way Home by director Lee JeongHyang, which is about a young spoiled grandson SangWoo, played by Kim EulBoon, learning love and respect for his aged, mute grandmother, played by Yu SeungHo. At one point in the film, SangWoo throws a hysteric fit about not getting the precise kind of chicken that he wanted for dinner. This would appear to be an overuse of emotion, because the viewer is prone to laughing at the scene, but it isn’t, because the scene conveys the ridiculousness of the situation by overdramatizing the events and adding some humour to the otherwise tense and hopeless point in the story. In contrast, at the end of the film, when the grandson realises that he’s been mean and insensitive, he starts being nice to his grandmother and cries when he has to leave her. Though this is rather melodramatic, it is very effective in emphasizing the transformation that SangWoo went through. By exaggerating the emotions of this scene, the director tries to convey to the audience that if they tried to go through a similar transformation, they will have a similar feeling of emotional release and happiness.

Another outstanding example of the use of generous emotion is Tae Geuk Gi ~ The Brotherhood of War, by director Kang JeGyu, in which two brothers are forced to fight in a war, which does all it can to tear their brotherly bond to shreds. Even though it manages to do so physically—by killing one of the brothers—the emotional bond between them never even wavers. While watching this movie, there was more than one place where I burst into tears because it was so emotionally charged, like the scene where the older brother JinTae is with the enemy army killing South Koreans, and refuses to believe that he is trying to kill his brother JinSeok, no matter how hard JinSeok pleads with him. It is a really tense and despair-filled scene and it brings out the deepest emotions. But it never felt as though the film is deliberately trying to milk tears out of the viewer like some Hollywood movies do. On the contrary, the beauty and truth of the movie created an atmosphere where one just can’t help but become emotional. These two directors have successfully been able to open new grounds in the area that Boggs and Petrie would have called a “lack of emotional restraint,” proving that it is not necessarily an undesireable concept.

On the other hand, some Korean directors choose to put a surprisingly small amount of emotion in places that would seem to have to burst with it. One such inconsistency is found in Chi-Hwa-Seon ~ Painted Fire by director Im KwonTaek, about a prodigious artist whose incredible skill brought him world-fame. He could never be happy, however, because the girl that he loved was in a different class than he, and in the end she married another, causing OhWon, the artist, to become a drunk, homeless wanderer. However, when this marriage happens, it is not a huge dramatic scene with tears and great sadness. On the contrary—we see OhWon go through an angry fit and then leave and start his wanderings. Instead of the audience being shocked and emotional, the movie has the audience accept this as just an event that happens and move on to the rest of the plot. And even though there could have been an emotional scene that could have worked well, this style works well for the film as well, because it reflects the artist’s wandering lifestyle and introversion, making you question whether OhWon himself really thought about what had happened, or whether he just acted on impulse. Therefore, KwonTaek effectively uses the lack of emotion itself as symbolic. A similar example is in the movie Untold Scandal by director Lee JeYong, which is about ChoWon, the cousin of Madam Cho, going too far in his attempts to prove the love of the widowed Lady Jung, a 27-year-old virgin, to Madam Cho. To accomplish this, he calls Lady Jung to see him, but when she arrives, excited and impatient to see her love again, he greets her sitting behind a windowsill with a young pretty girl, who giggles and runs away. ChoWon simply gives Lady Jung a cold heartless look, and after understanding what has happened, the lady passes out. The coldness and heartlessness of ChoWon’s actions towards Lady Jung is emphasised by the lack of emotion attached to this scene. It is almost as though the audience takes on ChoWon’s emotional perspective during this action, feeling no remorse for the actions and only focusing on winning the bet with Madam Cho. Similarly to Painted Fire, the director overuses emotional restraint as a symbol, to emphasise a point. But in contrast to the same movie, the audience is still feeling high emotional tension and a need for release during this emotionless scene, making it even more powerful. Clearly, in both of these films, the directors showed that overuse of emotional restraint can be a powerful element of a film, capable of conveying more meaning than the emotional style prescribed by Boggs and Petrie in their textbook.

It is obvious that, albeit an understandable perspective gained from collected research, Boggs and Petrie are wrong to assume that all movies must follow similar emotional formulae in order to be successful. These four masterful directors, among others, have unquestionably demonstrated that there can be great effect and meaning conveyed by using more or even less than the expected amount of emotion in a scene of a film. We are now left to question the extent to which Boggs and Petrie have erred. Is it only Korean directors that have this impressive ability to extend the horizons of emotion in films, or do other cultures have the same capacity? Is it coincidence that these four outstanding examples are all Korean-made, or is the opposite true, that the amount of such successful deviations from Boggs and Petrie’s theory found in just Korean films reflects that there are just as many examples in other cultures, resulting in a great conglomeration of counterexamples to this theory? Further research may reveal the answer to this important question, and whether this theory should be altogether refuted, or whether it can be applied with great caution.