This marks the third film we’ve watched by director Lee Chang-dong though it’s of his earliest works. It’s a bit of a coincidence that the same Gwangju Uprising that was covered in A Taxi Driver we’ve seen only recently is also a key event here but it makes sense that such a pivotal moment in the history of modern South Korea appears frequently in the country’s creative works.
The film recounts the story of the life of Kim Yong-ho in reverse chronological order, with the opening scene being him as a severely depressed middle-aged man. He stumbles upon a gathering of his old school mates but is incoherent and wanders onto the nearby railway tracks. Subsequent scenes show that he is penniless and estranged from his wife and child. He had previously been a businessman but was cheated by his business partner and lost his fortune in the stock market. Even then he comes across as a bully and an unsympathetic asshole. As we go further back, we see that he used to work as a police officer who routinely tortured suspects. But he was not always so bad a character and pines still for his first love Yun Sun-im. As a young student, he was as idealistic as the rest but his experiences as a military conscript broke him and his time in the police further hardened him, leading him to distance himself from the girl.
As anyone with a bit of knowledge about cinema can tell, this is very much a Citizen Kane type of film with the titular peppermint candy being its version of Rosebud. The film opens with the death of the main character and retraces his steps to show the audience how he arrived at the final fateful moment. Sol Kyung-gu does a good job at playing Yong-ho and it’s a real shock to contrast his early student self to the cynical and selfish monster we see so much of. As we’ve seen previously Lee Chang-dong is a more than competent director so there is plenty of powerful human drama. This feels like a serious, weighty film and I love how you can see the subtly changing South Korea in the background as we step further and further back into the past.
Still, this is a film that is about how a person’s entire life can be defined by a single fateful moment and I’m always skeptical that a person’s life can be summarized so neatly. Yong-ho’s path from being a soldier who made a mistake to a hardened interrogator seems like a tenuous one and it’s especially grating that the film shows the consequences of his downfall but not the process itself. The causes of his downfall, such as his business partner absconding and the stock market imploding, seem irrelevant to his choices in life and one gets the impression that if he were still doing well financially, his life would have been fine. This basically means that he came to a bad end by authorial fiat, in order to punish him for being a bad person. That is both simplistic and highly unsatisfactory.
It’s not a bad film and there is some emotion in Yong-ho’s relationship with Sun-im and how all of his subsequent relationships with women can’t hold a candle to his first love. But this isn’t a great film by any measure.