An incendiary shape-shifter of a mystery
Burning
(out of 4) Starring Yoon Ah-in, Steven Yeun and Jeon Jong-seo. Written by Lee Chang-dong and Oh Jung-mi. Directed by Lee Chang-dong. Opens Friday at TIFF Bell Lightbox. 148 minutes. 14A
Burning, one of the best films of 2018, is a movie of shadows and light that gets at populist rage by way of incendiary metaphor.
A stunner in form and content by South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong ( Poetry, Secret
Sunshine), it’s a simmering psychological thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Haneke. The suspense comes from the persistent dread that all is not what it seems; the planet is slightly off its axis.
A hit at this year’s Cannes and Toronto International Film festivals, Burning looks going in like a millennial love triangle between an impoverished country kid, a rich, city playboy and an impulsive mime artist. It is that but also so much more. This is no mere tangled romance.
Working from an enigmatic short story by Japan’s Haruki Murakami, writer/director Lee invests the drama with symbolladen commentary on the growing rage he perceives among young people, men in particular, toward a world they feel has left them with limited life choices.
Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) is one of them. An aspiring writer who never seems to find the time to write, he possesses a face that betrays his mixed emotions: part angry, part perplexed.
He lives alone on a rundown cattle farm in his rural hometown of Paju, northwest of Seoul on the border with North Korea. Communist agitprop blares from the north, punctuating the bucolic stillness. Jongsu’s family is MIA: his father is in jail, his mother and sister moved out long ago. The only other living thing on the farm is a single, sad-eyed cow.
Then Jong-su runs into Haemi (Jeon Jong-seo), a girl from Paju he hasn’t seen in years. She’s working in Seoul selling raffle tickets outside a discount store and he barely recognizes her: “I had plastic surgery!” she announces. She’ll later remind Jong-su, to his great discomfort, that he once called her ugly.
The amiable Hae-mi proves to be something of a shape-shifter. Over a café meal, she demonstrates to Jong-su her skills as a professional mime, pretending to peel and consume a tangerine that isn’t there. She observes how easy it is to trick people into believing something. She also talks about the difference between “little hunger” and “great hunger”: the former is a physical need, the latter is a spiritual one.
Jong-su has a great hunger. He doesn’t understand what Haemi is up to when she suddenly announces she’s going on a trip to Africa and wants him to look after her pet cat, named Boil, while she’s gone. He also doesn’t get it — but he’s thrilled all the same — when she begins to show affection for him.
He’s really mystified, and more than a little miffed, when he meets Hae-mi at the airport upon her return from Africa and finds her accompanied by Ben ( The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun), a rich playboy she met on her journey.
Ben, constantly smirking, claims he “plays” for a living and the playing is good: he drives a Porsche and lives in a luxury apartment. He also claims to never experience sorrow or jealousy and that he has the ability to palm-read people’s fortunes.
“I’ll do anything for fun,” he brags.
Ben later reveals to Jong-su, as they share a joint while Hae-mi naps nearby, that he has a criminally vandalous hobby, the spe- cifics of which he duly reveals but the intent he obscures behind musings about “morals of nature.”
By this point, deep into Burning, the ominous low bass sound heard throughout the film begins to cut through the cerebellum.
A puzzling romance becomes a full-on mystery as Jong-su turns detective — or maybe stalker? — in a quest driven by his great hunger that may never be sated.
Lee’s screenplay, co-written with Oh Jung-mi, is something of a shape-shifter itself. It’s significantly different from author Murakami’s original short story, “Barn Burning,” which was published in 1992 in the New Yorker and which, in turn, is significantly different from Murakami’s original source, a 1939 short story of the same name by William Faulkner.
Whatever the inspiration, Burning fires up the mind like few other films this year.