Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/04/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, April 4, 2020

Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)

Yoo Ah-in, Jun Jong-seo, and Steven Yeun in Burning

Cast: Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, Jun Jong-seo, Kim Soo-Kyung, Choi Seung-ho, Mun Seong-kun, Min Bok-gi, Lee Soo-Jeong, Ban Hye-ra, Cha Mi-Kyung, Lee Bong-ryeon. Screenplay: Oh Jungmi, Lee Chang-dong, based on a story by Haruki Murakami. Cinematography: Hong Kyung-pyo. Production design: Shin Jum-hee. Film editing: Kim Da-won, Kim Hyun. Music: Mowg.

Not surprisingly, given that it's based on one of his short stories, Burning gave me the unsettled feeling I get from reading Haruki Murakami's fiction: the sense that the world is stranger than it appears when we go about our daily routines. And that looking too closely at its anomalies can be dangerous. Certainly, if Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) had never paused to reacquaint himself with Shin Hae-mi (Jun Jong-seao), a friend from his childhood now grown up, he would never have been drawn into the mystery that surrounds her and Ben (Steven Yeun), the acquaintance she brings back from a trip to Africa. But who's to say that Jong-su's life, marked by his mother's abandoning the family when he was a child and by his father's trial for an act of angry violence, would have taken an easy course? The tension that builds throughout Burning is born of peeling back the layers of the quotidian. If we all did that, we probably wouldn't encounter elusive cats, disappearing women, Korean Gatsbys, and compulsive acts of arson the way Jong-su does, but Lee Chang-dong makes it entirely plausible that we might, which results in a brilliant, challenging, haunting film.