Movie Review: Jiseul

by refresh_daemon

[Everybody, please help me in welcoming reader, writer, and movie buff refresh_daemon, who is lending Dramabeans his extensive cinema knowledge and reviewing powers, which we’re thrilled to have. He’s starting off with the following review of Jiseul, a critically acclaimed 2012 indie film that… well, I’ll let him explain. Enjoy! –javabeans]
 

Korean independent film Jiseul is quite the wonder. Financed in part by crowdfunding, the micro-budget film went on to grab some pretty significant awards, first at Korea’s premiere film festival, the Busan International Film Festival, and then going on to be invited to Sundance and receive its World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, going on to claim more awards on the festival circuit. Furthermore, the film actually went on to make significant numbers at the box office, at least for an independent.

Having watched the film, I have to say that the praise is justified. Writer-director O Meul manages to strike an incredible balance between heavy historical tragedy, dark comedy, and the ordinariness of surviving horrors, glancing upon the Korean psyche while simultaneously rooting his tale in both the people of Jeju Island, where this film is set, as well as crafting it with a stunningly artistic eye that is neither alienating nor pandering, giving the gorgeous black and white photography a vibrancy through composition that color might actually dull.

But to even be able to fully appreciate the film, a little historical perspective is necessary:

In the aftermath of World War II, Japan, reeling from its total surrender to the Allied forces, withdrew from Korea after nearly half a century of effective forcible annexation. As with much of the rest of the world, Korea found itself divided between the new competing ideologies of the Cold War, with United States and Russia/China both vying for influence and their armies occupying halves of the peninsula. Each side set up puppet governments and got to work aggressively converting or rooting out subversive elements in their respective territory with no small amount of blood being shed on each side in the ensuing purges.

Jeju Island, today known for being a major local resort destination for mainlanders, was one area that was particularly devastated by this purge. The communist contingent of Jeju Island staged demonstrations against the installation of the puppet government by the United States and eventually, violence erupted, with the local police forces murdering some of the protesters and subsequently inciting a full-on rebellion.

The new right-wing South Korean government, failing peaceable surrender from the rebels, sent its military and proceeded to wage what amounted to a scorched earth campaign against the inhabitants of the islands, razing and massacring entire villages without differentiating between rebels and non-political residents. It is the story of one of these villages that Jiseul tells.

As the military wages its campaign against these villages in the cold of winter, we find the residents of one village casually evacuating as they had learned to do during the Japanese occupation. They bicker with each other and complain about the inconvenience as they follow Kyeongjun (Lee Kyeongjun) to seek nearby caves to hide out in. Wonsik’s uncle worries about leaving his pig to starve, and Sundeok’s parents (Kim Dongho and Park Sundeok) worry about their daughter (Kang Hee) who has gone missing, and poor Mudong (Park Sundong) is forced to leave his crippled mother (O Yeongsun) behind.

Meanwhile, the military has since occupied the adjacent village. After slaughtering everyone in it, they proceed to eat through its provisions while tensions exist in the mainland forces, as Corporal Baek (Baek Jonghwan) is starved for his unwillingness to kill those whom he deems innocents. While the villagers find their refuge and then suffer from their worries about what they left behind, tempting them to return to the village and possibly compromise their location, the military makes plans to search all the caves in the area for the remaining so-labeled communists.

To choose to name the film Jiseul is quite an interesting act, “jiseul” meaning “potato” in the local Jeju dialect. It highlights the difference between the islanders and the mainlanders not only in language, but also as Jeju isn’t an ideal grounds for rice cultivation, potatoes become a significant source of nourishment instead on the island as opposed to rice on the mainland.

The villagers themselves even come to resemble potatoes in a striking moment of photography where O Meul frames the villagers in the cave deep underground with the surface at the top of the frame, placing the villagers as potatoes hidden deep understand, idyllically stuck together deep below the cold harsh surface of winter, unknowing of their fate to be found, plucked, and harvested. Yet even as the film distinguishes the islanders from the mainlanders, it also strikes a parallel to the same kind of purging that happened on the mainland, both before the war and during it, echoing the theme of the unjust persecution of the innocent, their harsh suffering and loss, and their struggle to continue on that forms a major theme in Korean storytelling at large. And this perhaps explains why the film resonated so well with local audiences.

It’s also interesting the divide that is cast between the villagers and the military and the military not being seen as a monolithic force, thanks to the presence of objectors like Corporal Baek. This puts the film in a rather reasonable state, humanizing the villain of the film and showing the complexity within what could have been demonized. While the characters are mostly written simply, the effect of the chorus of villagers and of military creates two greater representations of the islanders and the military, the former perhaps not taking the grave situation seriously enough and resigned or perhaps ignorant to its fate, and the latter stifling its conscience in order accomplish the goals of its ideology.

And while the film depicts the military as being composed exclusively of Koreans, it does make a concerted effort to note that the US military command had ordered that all persons living over 5km from the peninsula be considered communists and that the US oversaw the massacre of the inhabitants. This is perhaps the only really forced element of the film, which is strong enough in the conflict that we see, both within each group and between them, that it essentially feels like a work of art having a political message forced on it.

And the art of the film works. It’s obvious from the moment the film begins that Jiseul is an art film, with its slow motion black and white photography following a soldier searching through a house for what ultimately turns out to be food, eventually sitting down next to another soldier and the naked corpse of a woman stuffed into a chest, asking for a knife and proceeding to share his discovered fruit. The film is filled with evocative images especially in its transitions, like a race up a hill in silhouette as the sky goes from day to night or, during one of the intentional titled act breaks, capturing the horrible sight of Baek pointing a gun at Sundeok in the middle of a field of snow, the two figures in a striking composition that shows just how tiny and alone they each are in a harsh world.

The artistic point of view eventually overtakes the reality of the story pushing it to the boundary of magical realism, but in a meaningful way as film can only represent an imagined tale of what happened on the island, due to the suppression of information of the events and therefore not acting as a historical document, but almost a kind of collective attempt at remembering a vanished past to expose the psyche of both Jeju and Korea as a whole.

Jiseul also makes excellent use of its sound field, both in having sounds linger for symbolic purposes as well as using careful sound recording and mixing techniques to show, for example, the warmth and casualness of the villagers in their underground sanctum, the echoes and the volume working in unison to create an effect of warmth, well reflecting the warmth they find in community with each other.

And while the actors are almost entirely non-professionals and, like director O Meul, local to Jeju Island, they handle their simple roles well and manage the film’s dark sense of humor well, playing straight their petty bickering and silly situations like the points where they all jump into pits together, which serves as worthwhile contrast to the brutality of war. Even if none of the thespians have particularly commanding performances, it all works because their simple characters are largely working to create the greater characters representing the villagers and the military.

The Korean War remains a popular setting in Korean storytelling because the impact in the present is still so obvious with two the Koreas still separated by a line beset with guns and mines and the legacy of the decisions made outside of the hands of Koreans over fifty years ago still effective today, the other side of that border remaining an unavoidable representation of the tremendous loss of the people to the forces of the Cold War. And the echoes of that cruel separation that rang in how the new government murdered its own people to legitimize itself show a separation that exists even within one side of that border. Just as South Korea was itself torn between the forces of ideology, so was Jeju and the mainland. And on Jeju in 1948, between the villagers and the military. And even within the villagers and the military itself.

Jiseul captures the cry of that tear, paints it in black and white on celluloid and on the canvases of the faces of the actors, who themselves are the decedents of those in Jeju who survived the massacre, all to create a fantastic memory of both the pain of division in the past and from it, as well as the warmth and community that was there and continues to hold together its people today. That makes it a fine film indeed. 9/10.