‘Bayou Caviar’ a bloody good noir

‘Children Gone’ traces NKorea war orphans abroad

IBy Owen Gleiberman

t used to be that when actors tried their hand at directing, the movies that resulted were glorified actors’ showcases, driven by performance but scrappy around the edges. These days, though, even an actor who makes a low-budget independent feature will often use it to try to show off the intuitive reach and power of his filmmaking chops.

“Bayou Caviar”, directed and co-written by its star, Cuba Gooding Jr, is a sunlit New Orleans noir built around a surreptitiously shot tape in which one of the on-camera participants is a 16-year-old girl. It’s also a character study built around the battle-weariness of Gooding’s Rodney Jones, a former boxing champion whose rise and fall is meant to incarnate all the ways the world conspires to keep a black man down. (The movie ends with Rodney making a highly symbolic fist.) The film is also a meditation on loyalty, an inquiry into the changing nature of fame in the age of TMZ, and a portrait of assorted interlocking sectors of the New Orleans community. Whatever works, or doesn’t, about “Bayou Caviar”, you can’t accuse the film of lacking ambition.

But maybe it has too much ambition. Gooding, directing his first feature, brings the movie a quality that any good noir needs: an icy amorality. It’s there in the pulpy relish of the scenes with Richard Dreyfuss as Uri, a Russian gangster who’s looking to keep his favorite lawyer on the payroll and decides to find (or plant) dirt on the lawyer’s son (Gregg Bello), a fuddy-duddy pillar of the local community. It’s there in the heartless cunning with which Rodney, who works as a bouncer at Uri’s nightclub, takes on this assignment, cozying up to the dazed teenage Kat (Lia Marie Johnson) and convincing her that if she agrees to join in an illicit tape, it will be her ticket to fame.

It’s there in the way that Nic (Famke Janssen), a cynical goth photographer, goes along with this scheme. And it’s there in the movie’s title, which sounds like an unappetizing dish at Commander’s Palace – but is, in fact, even less appetizing Mob slang for a way of disposing of dead bodies by cutting them into parts and feeding them to alligators.

What the movie needed is sleekness, visual mood, and surprise, not to mention a more tightly plotted script. You can’t say “Bayou Caviar” doesn’t have twists, but it has the wrong ones. Once it’s known that the tape exists, everyone in the movie tries to get their paws on it, which results in awkward scenes like one in which Kat’s burly stepfather wanders into Nic’s apartment and just happens to see the tape playing on her computer. And though Gooding’s performance has some striking moments in which we see what a manipulative mask Rodney knows how to put on, as a filmmaker he doesn’t push the bad behavior far enough. A movie like this one should reflect that, but it can’t be so busy saying it.

A new documentary sheds light on the little-known story of North Korean war orphans sent to Poland, where they formed an unlikely bond with their teachers before their traumatic return home.

“The Children Gone to Poland” – which premiered Saturday at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea – traces the journey of the 1,200 orphans sent from the North during the 1950-53 Korean War.

Division

The devastating conflict, which sealed the division of the flashpoint peninsula, killed at least half a million civilians and left at least 100,000 children without parents.

The North’s then-leader Kim Il Sung sent thousands of orphans to countries including the Soviet Union, Hungary and Poland from 1951, pleading with his communist allies to take care of them.

The group of 1,200 orphans arrived in 1953 at the small, forested village of Plakowice, where they lived in a former hospital building for six years under the care of Polish teachers.

Famed South Korean actress Choo Sang-mee, who directed the film, visits Poland to find traces of the war orphans, alongside a North Korean defector with her own distressing childhood memories of separation from her family.

“Trains full of children arrived (over) several days,” retired teacher Jozef Borowiec said in the film, adding many were in a “state of shock and trauma” after witnessing the horrors of war.

The orphans, infested with lice and suffering from disease, insisted on sleeping under the bed in fear of the bombing campaigns they lived through at home, while constantly screaming and crying in their sleep.

But they quickly learned Polish and formed bonds with their teachers and caregivers, who knew from personal experience the horrors of war.

“Back then, we also went through horrible wars and had many heartbreaking memories ourselves,” Borowiec, 91, told Choo.

“We told them to call us mum and dad... We wanted to do everything to help these (North Korean) orphans erase the memories of war and have a sense of family in Poland,” he said, wiping away tears.

Old photos and videos showed the orphans laughing, studying Polish, dancing and singing, or playing with teachers and other Polish children – a typical childhood denied in their homeland.

The teachers soon got to know each of them – whose names they tearfully remember even decades later.

“The children were brought here as part of international propaganda (to cement diplomatic ties),” Jolanta Krysowata, a Polish journalist who wrote a book about the North Korean orphans, says in the film.

“But the teachers developed real compassion for these orphans... the human feelings they shared with the children had little to do with politics,” said Krysowata, whose book inspired the latest documentary.

North Korea eventually ordered the children to return and join the country’s post-war reconstruction efforts, prompting some to lie on the snow and even pour cold water over themselves in a desperate bid to fall sick and avoid repatriation.

Many sent letters back to the teachers, describing their days in Poland as the best time of their lives and bemoaning the backbreaking labour they faced back home.

One child even died during a failed attempt to illegally cross the border to neighbouring China, after sending multiple letters begging Borowiec to take him back. (Agencies)