WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN: Are Koreans too fond of sex? |
If you were lucky enough to have experienced “Visions from the South: Korean Cinema 1960–2005,” a wonderful introduction to Joseon cinema that filmmaker Gina Kim curated for the Harvard Film Archive a couple of years back, then you’re already aware of some of the world-class auteurs hailing from Northeast Asia. From the prolific 70-year-old Im Kwon-taek (his 1993 masterpiece, Sopyonje, is a meditation on suffering for one’s art from this director of nearly 100 films) to relative newcomers Park Chan-wook (represented in the series by 2000’s Joint Security Area; his operatic revenge thriller Oldboy was the Grand Prix winner at Cannes in 2004) and Hong Sang-soo (whose 2000 Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors offered a cinematic Möbius strip of awkward couplings, as three men vie to be the first to bed the title virgin). If not, then the Museum of Fine Arts’ inaugural Korean Film Festival (which began with Wednesday’s screening of Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, the most popular film in South Korean history and a “monster movie” that’s so much more) picks up where the HFA series left off.
Rather than focus on the fountainheads of modern Korean cinema, this new series relies on the emerging voices, a generation that appears content to explore similar themes from film to film. This is not a criticism; Japanese masters Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi spent entire careers doing much the same thing, to stunning effect.
Although none of the directors represented in this series has come close to achieving the status of Ozu or Mizoguchi, the comparison remains valid. The Host burrows through many of the same dank caverns and dark spaces as Bong’s previous thriller, 2003’s Memories of Murder, with death always hovering just outside of the frame. Likewise, Hong’s WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN (2004; January 26, 6 pm + January 28, 1:45 pm) finds him returning to his preoccupation with immoral men and their desire to seduce.
Munho (Yoo Jitae), a university art lecturer, has everything: the perfect wife, a gorgeous home, and an expansive yard for his dog to roam in. He’s happy to gloat about his status to his old college friend, aspiring film director Hunjoon (Kim Taewoo), who’s just returned from film school in the United States. Hunjoon had professed his love to the gorgeous art student Sunhwa (Sung Hyunah) prior to leaving for the US; he promptly forgot her, leaving Munho to take advantage of the devastated beauty before discarding her just as callously.
Now, as Hunjoon and Munho meet for drinks, one of them observes: “Koreans are too fond of sex. They have nothing better to do.” Inevitably, their drunken thoughts return to the girl they both treated so badly, so off they set on a snowy cab ride to reclaim their past.
The tale is not as straightforward as it sounds, however. Hong, as he demonstrated in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, is more than willing to dispense with accepted notions of narrative subjectivity. Events don’t happen in sequence so much as they occur in different ways. Harking back to a milestone of that other Japanese master, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon, the film shows us similar yet different events taking place, perhaps concurrently. What is the truth? Hong provides not answers but differing perspectives, and as far as these men are concerned, they want only to relive the past — whatever that past may be.
