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’DARE’ TO WATCH

Korean film festival returns to BAM with bold, if flawed, dramas

By Drew Pisarra
for The Brooklyn Paper
Ahn Byeong-Ki's 2004 horror film, "Bunshinsaba," will be screened Sept. 10 at 9 pm as part of the "New York Korean Film Festival."

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There’s something amusingly appropriate about the subtitle of the fifth annual New York Korean Film Festival - "Truth and Dare."

The phrase calls to mind the Madonna documentary "Truth or Dare" and, intentionally or not, the dozen movies - screening at BAMcinematek from Sept. 7 to Sept. 11 - have much in common with the cheeky superstar’s oeuvre.

Within the fest, you’ll find sly social commentary and steamy sex scenes, overt flirtations with the taboo and women-centered power struggles, nonsensical occultism and some seriously bad acting. Even if the NYKFF - like the Material Girl - has taken a fall this year, you can’t help but acknowledge that if this isn’t Korea’s golden age of cinema it certainly is a brassy one.

"It’s not a bad thing for a girl to be aggressive," says a man early on in director Byeon Hyeok’s harrowing adultery tale, "The Scarlet Letter." (This particular feature, which will not play at BAM, closes the NYKFF’s opening week, which runs Sept. 2 to Sept. 6 at Manhattan’s Lighthouse Theater.) Throughout the festival, Hyeok’s off-the-cuff endorsement of tough broads and its implicit critique of guileless ingenues acts like an unspoken mantra: The strong woman triumphs; the simplest of girls is doomed.

Take a look at the stereotypically feisty geriatric widows battling among their marijuana fields in the country-mouse/city-mouse comedy "Mapado: All About the Hemp and Widows" or the she-devils fighting for supremacy in the supernatural horror flick "Bunshinsaba" or the spitting, cursing mom and her rebellious daughter in the fantasia "My Mother, the Mermaid," and you’ll notice one recurring fact: The women are often the primary instigators of action.

When a traditional sweet young thing enters the picture, like the mail-order bride in Park Young-Hoon’s Pygmalion confection "Innocent Steps," the immaturity (and malleability) of her character ends up contributing to her husband’s undoing. Apparently, even in the world of ballroom dancing, if you’re not "sure of step," you’re likely to cripple your partner’s future.

That decidedly contrarian view of the ingenue is taken to the furthest extreme with the tearjerker "A Moment to Remember." Akin to Lifetime’s trauma-of-the-week, D-list star vehicles, this mawkish melodrama de-glamorizes the absentminded naif. This ditzy designer isn’t a Seoul-full take on Judy Holliday, she’s someone suffering prematurely from Alzheimer’s. By the final reel, she’s a simple, pretty, empty shell.

If this all suggests that the NYKFF is nothing more than a gender studies seminar on celluloid, think again. Like its inadvertently invoked icon, the festival is filled with contradictions, complexities and complications. Not quite mysteries perhaps, the despairing, stylishly shot, existential dramas at which Korean auteurs excel thrive on ambiguity and ambivalence. They sometimes feel indebted to ’70s noir; other times, to early Antonioni with a richer palette. And unlike their peers internationally, these East Asian filmmakers get untold pleasure out of killing a main character midway ("The Big Swindle") or otherwise confounding expectations ("Spider Forest").

The formulaic but immensely enjoyable crime pic "Another Public Enemy" keeps your attention with its narrative twists and turns all the while adhering to a classic the law vs. the rich scenario. And if for no other reason then to mess with your head, director Kang Woo-Suk has cast the same lead actor (Sol Kyung-Gu) from his pseudo-prequel "Public Enemy" which was screened at BAM in 2002, in a completely different part that bears the same name.

"Hypnotized," this year’s most lavishly realized and intellectually engaging entry has all the external markings of a classic noir: unspeakable crimes, rich atmospherics, and a riveting femme fatale. But to label it a whodunit would be to undersell what it actually is: a what-the-hell-is-going-on.

Initially the story of an alluring, imbalanced writer and her soul-searching, world-weary therapist, the narrative of "Hypnotized" keeps shifting its allegiance from the psychotic siren to the disturbed psychiatrist. When scenes of the troubled woman’s heartfelt lovemaking with her possibly fantasized soul-mate jump cut to a hypnotically induced affair with her doctor, you’re unsure whose erotic dreams are being realized. That is, if they’re real at all.

And if you think the violation of the therapist-patient contract is perverse, you’ll be even more disturbed - and surprised - by the psychosexual tensions in the slapstick dramedy "A Romance of Their Own." Here, a young girl must choose between two lovers: a dashing thug from her high school and her long-absent half-brother. (Maybe the histrionic family flick "My Brother" would have benefited from a little incest, too.)

Although laughs may come more readily and often in the likeably dumb comedy "Ghost House," the twisted love triangle in "A Romance of Their Own" does have one advantage. The movie’s crazy plot and adolescent-aged cast ensure that Mrs. Guy Ritchie will never helm a remake.

 

BAMcinematek hosts "Truth and Dare: The New York Korean Film Festival 2005" from Sept. 7 to Sept. 11. Tickets are $10. The theater is located at 30 Lafayette Ave. at Ashland Place in Fort Greene. Tickets are $10; $7 seniors 65 and older, children 12 and younger and students 25 and younger with ID (Mondays through Thursdays). For the Brooklyn festival schedule, visit the Web site at www.bam.org or call (718) 636-4100. For the Manhattan schedule, Sept. 2-Sept. 6 at the Lighthouse Theatre (111 E. 59th St.), visit www.koreanfilmfestival.org.

©2005 Community Newspaper Group

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