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

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, 1999)

Sul Kyung-gu in Peppermint Candy

Cast: Sul Kyung-gu, Moon So-ri, Kim Yeo-jin, Park Soo-young, Park Sung-yeon. Screenplay: Lee Chang-dong. Cinematography: Hyung Koo Kim. Art direction: Park Il-hyun. Film editing: Hyun Kim. Music: Jaejin Lee. 

What could have been a gimmick in the hands of a lesser writer-director than Lee Chang-dong becomes  revelatory in Peppermint Candy: Life can only be understood through hindsight. The film begins with the moments leading up to the suicide of Yongho (Sul Kyung-gu) after he shows up at the reunion picnic of a group of factory workers. Behaving erratically, he first disturbs the group and then climbs to a railway trestle where he stands in front of an oncoming train. The film then flashes back to scenes from Yongho's life, each one earlier than the one that has gone before: first three days earlier, then in succession, five years before, 12 years before, 15 years before, 19 years before, and finally 20 years before -- the only sequence that takes place at the site of his suicide. The accumulation of details, laced through with various leitmotifs such as the candy that gives the film its title, presents a portrait of a man brutalized by experience, and in particular by the experience of living through two decades of South Korea's troubled history. It's a study in remorse and guilt and compulsive misbehavior that succeeds because of Lee's storytelling skill and Sul's lacerating performance.  

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