EVERYBODY HURTS
MANY ARTISTS HAVE BEEN BEWILDERED OR embittered into cinema; it’s an art form hospitable to the aggrieved. That part of the filmmaker that feels unseen or misunderstood gets to relish the power of holding his audience captive for two hours, forcing them to perceive the world’s ugliness as he does. In the films of the great Korean director Lee Changdong, you can detect a passionate fury quivering in nearly every frame and, along with that, a temptation to lash out, to give humanity what’s coming to it. These are movies in which any awful thing can happen: people commit suicide, manipulate and terrorize each other, become victims of extortion or sexual assault or the ravages of old age and abandonment. Cruelty has about as comfortable a place in everyday life as a beam of sunlight or a patch of blue sky. It’s no wonder Lee has repeatedly used the working title “Project Rage.”
A worldview this pitch-black can easily come off as mere sadism or nihilism. But while it would be wrong to suggest that his films are free of those attitudes—no one looking trauma this squarely in the face could be expected to forswear them entirely—Lee is not one to wallow in misery for its own sake. Though he made his film debut, his first feature in eight years and one of his bleakest yet, you come away feeling seduced, not punished. Like all his best work, this film—in barest outline a love triangle, liberally adapted from “Barn Burning,” a short story by Haruki Murakami from 1983—is as interested in negotiating our emotional distance from his protagonists as it is in all of the bad luck that befalls them. Ambiguity is never sacrificed at the altar of his disdain, which means that his characters don’t get to be anything as basic as passive martyrs or agents of triumph. Like most of us, they tend to fall somewhere in between.
