Inspired after reading Darcy Paquet’s New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, I decided to pick a random director from the Korean New Wave to watch and landed on Im Sang-soo, who, while not as distinguished as the likes of Bong Joon-ho, Lee Chang-dong or Park Chan-wook, has still released plenty of films that have received international recognition and has even reached #1 at the South Korean box office.
I watched his films in chronological order until I got to Heaven: To The Land of Happiness which currently has only screened at a few festivals. I’ll start with the film I liked the most and move down to the film I liked the least. There will be spoilers. If you haven’t watched any of them, I only recommend the first two.
1. Where to start: The President’s Last Bang (2005)
The President’s Last Bang is Im’s most controversial but probably also his most entertaining and important film. It imagines what the assassination of Korean president Park Chung-hee might have been like, and serves as a reminder that it was not too long ago that Korean film was been under the hand of censors. Around four minutes of documentary footage were initially censored for the first year of its release.
It places the ridiculousness of a key moment in South Korean history on full display, with comedic flourishes to highlight just how absurd it was. Park Chung-hee was a dictator who used his intelligence agency to fully suppress opposition, yet we see footage of women crying in the streets as his body is paraded through the streets. How insane is that? The brilliance of this script is to paint Kim Jae-kyu as a guy who hits the limit of what he can tolerate and decides to take matters into his own hands. Most can relate to the emptiness of having your soul eroded by work and the frustration of dealing with a boss you disagree with.
Im starts off this film about a historical assassination with a shot of supermodels ditching their tops and jumping into a pool - and somehow makes it work. He migrates that playful tone into a silly sideways pan through an interrogation facility that is equally brutal and hilarious. “You call those dicks?” “How can you even think about democracy or revolution with dicks like that?” There are events extreme enough that the only reasonable way to process them is through comedy, and a violent transition of power like this is certainly one of them.
If you are new to Im’s work, I would start here. It’s accessible, funny, and jumps into the stranger-than-fiction details of an interesting history non-Koreans may not be familiar with.
2. Sexy and disturbing: A Good Lawyer’s Wife (2003)
Im Sang-soo managed to get nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice for A Good Lawyer’s Wife, which was his first #1 box office hit.
A Good Lawyer’s Wife is surprisingly moral. Im Sang-soo seems to always be concerned with the consequences of sex, which just about every character in this film is having all the time in this domestic drama. Even the death of close family members isn’t enough to stop cheaters from cheating. If anything it’s liberation that all his characters are seeking; the wife and her mother-and-law try to claw away from the subjugation of marriage while the lawyer sprints away from the stress of life.
Every actor is good in this. Moon So-ri plays the role of sexually repressed MILF (or pedophile, depending on your point of view) with a devastatingly flirtious smile. I imagine that the poster of her wearing nothing but a box with the film title on it was part of the box office draw, but I hope that the main driver was her award-winning performance in the previous year’s Oasis. She ended up winning a few Best Actress honors for this film as well. Hwang Jung-min pulls his weight too in the role of a cheater who is very clearly overwhelmed by the task of managing his various lives.
The shot quality in this film is leaps and bounds above that of his first two films. Still by the time we start to wind down, it can feel a bit like a bunch of discussion about nothing (despite fully fleshed out ideas) because we are violently yanked from comedy into tragedy in a way that isn’t appropriately satirical. Unlike an Audition (2000) where the comedic start heightens the twist into horror, it feels like A Good Lawyer’s Wife takes characters meant for comedy and thrusts them into a world they just don’t belong in. It can make it easy to tap out rather than engage when the oddly upbeat xylophones come in.
3. The debut: Girl’s Night Out (1998)
Girl’s Night Out isn’t Im’s most controversial film but it stirred up some drama in its day because of the sexual dialogue. It’s not for the prudish: the entire film is centered on three women and their relationship with sex - which means we spend much of the 105 minutes either watching it, talking about it, or building up to it.
I really like the lack of heavy drama or comedy in this film. It’s like a coming-of-age for adults with the sole focus on sexual liberation. For that freedom, one of the women has to leave the country! And each girl needs to find her own way to get off, whether it’s using a friend for a quick ride, hooking up with a flaky cartoonist, catching the attention of a desperate married man, or just doing it solo the old fashioned way. There’s an unembellished quality to the dialogue which allows the characters to joke without turning the whole thing into a farce. In other films a line like “I think masturbation is free, and economical, and no burden, very nice” probably never works.
There are some weird cuts especially toward the end and the graduate student’s story is under-explored, but for a debut this is solid especially given the time and place of its release.
4. Remaking a legendary film: The Housemaid (2010)
The consensus is that 1960’s The Housemaid is one of the greatest Korean films of all time, which makes Im Sang-soo’s attempt to bring this story to modern audiences quite admirable. Both are erotic thrillers featuring a maid who starts working for a rich man and his pregnant wife before starting to unravel the threads of their household. Im’s The Housemaid was brought to Cannes to compete but Uncle Boonmee won in that year (I’d go further to say that The Housemaid probably wasn’t even the best film from SK in 2010 - I like Poetry more).
To me this remake sits in the weird purgatory inhabited by mediocre films with potential to be truly great. Im at least is able to summon a cast that has enough skill for this monumental task. Frequent Im collaborator Youn Yu-jung has perfected the role of stern old lady (and is just a phenomenal actress in general) and provides depth to the film’s most nuanced character, a chief of house staff whose class traitor tendencies are just “in her bones.” Jeon Do-yeon fits right in as well. Lee Jung-jae unfortunately doesn’t get to do much besides show his abs in what becomes a battle between women, which I think is one of the fatal flaws of the film. Because he is absent for the majority of the film (and a 1-D womanizer when present), his return at the end just doesn’t have the necessary weight; he is more plot device than character.
The biggest miss for me in this film is the climax. After a strong opener and a nicely paced slow burn an explosion is needed but never fully comes. The conflagration at the end arrives far too late, although I’ll concede that the way that the ending ties back to the suicide in the beginning is on point.
5. Another erotic thriller: The Taste of Money (2012)
Im brought this one to Cannes and received (rightfully?) poor reviews by the critics there before calling it a “very Korean story” foreigners can’t understand. I disagree: every country has its own 1%-ers; the ones shown here just happen to be 0.001%-ers who own giant conglomerates. The Taste of Money is a spiritual sequel to The Housemaid in genre and content, focusing again on a rich family’s human dysfunction through the lens of their staff.
The Taste of Money has the shell of a Parasite-tier film but just has too many variables working against it. Like The Housemaid, it showcases Im’s strength in building a suffocating atmosphere through intrigue and sexual tension. His issue is bringing it to a conclusion, and this one ends in a melodramatic mess. Kim Kang-woo’s character spends too much time as a bystander in the power struggle which results in him having few things to do besides take off his shirt. He is the stand-in for the outsider everyman (or at least the “salaryman” class), yet Im doesn’t provide enough background on him for the audience to sympathize with or enough contrast from the “licentious” rich conglomerate elite. Nearly everyone has a respectable turn, although Paquet draws the short straw and gets the role of a character named Robert Altman (a crass joke) who could be the cartoonish white villain in an old Hong Kong B-movie. Youn Yuh-jung as the bitter matriarch is the most outstanding in her role. Maui Taylor’s usage on the other hand is weird - she brings a foreign element that’s never explored enough for any real depth while forcing characters to use awkward English that is no fun for anyone involved.
Honorable mentions go to a few shots: a swirl around a family dinner to hone in on the father awkwardly fondling the maid, a ground level look at a floor so clean it looks like the surface of a lake, and the reflection of the main character in the painting of a plane. This film uses home security cameras to introduce drama very well but this tactic disappears mid-way through this film.
6. It only gets worse from here: The Old Garden (2006)
The Old Garden is based on a best-selling novel about a couple separated in the aftermath of political strife in the 80’s. I haven’t read it, but I assume that the book is much, much better. The pieces never quite come together in the end and the emotional content feels just out of reach. Maybe for a viewer who was a student during the time of the Gwangju massacre this cuts deeper and this actually is a Korean story I can’t understand as a foreigner (even if I’m familiar with the history).
The male protagonist’s story never brings true despair to the viewer because the key event that puts the male lead in prison for seventeen years is a tragedy of a dumb mistake and not a tragedy of character. He moves through the film but never reflects in a way that the viewer can digest; he’s just having flashbacks for the audience’s sake. The movie is better when it pivots to the woman’s perspective in the second half because her story is slightly more interesting. Still, her character’s limits are not pushed particularly hard and she ends up dying without much to express besides sadness.
7. Youthful rebels: Tears (2001)
Tears is one of those inscrutable coming-of-age films that take a quick peek into the lives of those on the edges of society. Either you’ll find interest in these delinquents’ humanity or find the entire work boring. The difference between Tears and a film like Rebels of the Neon God (which I highly recommend) is that the main character’s inner life never comes to the screen. The reason that he rejects his stable home to live as a vagrant for fun is never explored, even though that’s the most interesting aspect of his character!
In this world of collective suffering that Im portrays, the other three fit right in. “To eat, or to be free” is the question the group ponders after a dine-and-dash incident gone wrong. But again the idea of the main character wallowing in homeless misery for fun despite those conditions causing one of the girls in the group to start sex work she clearly hates just feels crass because it’s never expanded on.
8. Please skip: Intimate Enemies (2015)
After watching Intimate Enemies, I can only assume that this is Im’s immature response to receiving criticism at Cannes for a more serious drama in The Taste of Money. He has great leads in Ryoo Seung-bum whose wide-mouth grin is an endless fountain of naive joy and Go Joon-hee who fits right in as the crazy, leggy, junk collector. Sadly, their usage is purely goofy. The motorcycle helmet staying on during sex is not even close to the most absurd thing in a movie that turns immigrants into caricatures for no good reason (not even offensive, just dumb) and that summons the weirdest iteration of a Korean gangster (with dreads!) I’ve ever seen - and none of it is funny. I’m an action movie junkie; blow things up, kill people in cool ways, make me laugh, and I’ll be happy. Yet even I didn’t have a particularly good time.
Final thoughts
Previously I’ve almost always been rewarded for watching directors’ complete filmographies. Even if there are duds (e.g. Kubrick’s Fear and Desire) usually progressing through the filmmaker’s journey in time is fun. Somehow this time was different…it feels like I watched Im Sang-soo peak, get frustrated, and then just lose it. Nonetheless, I’ll continue doing these series. Even if some of these movies weren’t great, I still enjoyed watching them.