Today will be the last of Korean film reviews for the time being, unless something remarkable comes my way over the next months. I wish I could say that our festival attendance ended on a high note, but unfortunately the reverse is true -- two nearly incomprehensible movies.
I was intrigued by the description of "A Fish" in the festival programme: 'Superbly shot in home-made 3-D, delivering more frissons-per-minute than most Hollywood thrillers'. Well this turned out to be brochure hyperbole. In his indie debut the director created his own version of 3-D lensing, at times effective and at other times headache-inducing, and I understand that most of the film's screenings have been the 2-D version. It starts with the hand of an unseen body knocking on a car window to question the driver and continues in much the same vein with, for example, the back of our protagonist in the foreground listening in to the telephone conversation of another character. Even when a whole landscape is shot in clear prospective, this expertise only makes the story being told even more obscure.
Our 'hero', a university lecturer, has hired a seedy detective to trace his runaway wife who has apparently become a shaman on Jindo Island -- and they journey there to drag her home. Meanwhile we have two anonymous fisherman on a platform in a foggy river wondering whether fish can dream, catching a talking fish which they proceed to cut up for sashimi, and subsequently forgetting each other's identity. Characters disappear at random and there is an over-reliance of mystifying mirror shots. I have not the foggiest idea what the film was meant to convey; perhaps we are all something of a hunter suddenly morphing into the hunted. Don't ask me to explain this any further.
I didn't twig when booking that "Alone" was the sophomore feature of the same writer-director Park Hong-Min (and of course I'd not yet viewed the elusive "Fish"), but had I known, I might have saved myself another interminable and largely unintelligible movie. This one started OK as a photographer witnesses a murder (maybe) from his rooftop, and is then chased by thugs who corner him in his studio. The next thing we know is that he is wandering totally naked and nearly amnesiac through the labyrinthine alleyways built on hillsides in the old districts of Seoul, apparently due for demolition and redevelopment. He winds his way back to his workshop where he finds a headless corpse and is next seen still wandering, but now clothed, through the same twisty streets. Here he encounters a sobbing young boy (who may or may not be him as a child) dragged off by his abusive father. He also sees his now dead mother and his on-off girlfriend (who probably isn't the same actress as his ma, but might well be) and these characters keep re-appearing and disappearing as he struggles along, up and down.
The movie is reasonably well-shot in the night-time byways of the city, and the lead, a stage actor Lee Juwon, won the award for best new actor at last year's Busan International Film Festival, but the film remains a puzzle. I guess one could hypothesize that the nightmare alleyways represent the nightmare confusion in the character's mind, a maze from which he is unable to escape. However I am only second-guessing what Park may or may not have been attempting to convey. Not an uninteresting scenario, but a far from comprehensible one. Maybe I should have been guided by the two films' IMDb ratings, 4.9 and 5.7 respectively which I would normally interpret as 'proceed with caution'.
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