LOVE TRIANGLE BURNS IN KOREAN THRILLER
Wily new film is both ‘lovely’ and ‘maddening’
The first image in Burning, the newest film from Korean master Lee Chang-dong (Poetry, Secret Sunshine), is smoke blowing from the cigarette of the protagonist, delivery boy Jongsu. The final shot is a vehicle on fire in a field. The two and a half hours in between are a fantastic mysterythriller, all slow build and slow burn.
Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) is slackjawed and listless and lives on his parents’ rural property so far from Seoul that he can hear North Korean propaganda wafting across the border at night. But he reads Faulkner and has just completed a creative writing course at university, so maybe there’s more to him than meets the eye.
During that opening scene he runs into an old schoolmate, Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), who asks him to look after her cat while she’s on vacation. She brings him back to her flat, where the cat refuses to show itself. Then they have perfunctory sex, which clearly affects him more than it does her.
A few weeks later, Jong-su is disconcerted when Hae-mi comes back with a new friend, Ben (Steven Yeun), a rich playboy who tells Jong-su of his business affairs: “You wouldn’t understand even if I told you.”
Jong-su can’t warm to this ice-cold Gatsby type, but puts up with him to be close to Hae-mi, whose own feelings remain frustratingly opaque.
Lee based his film on the short story Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami, in which he admits not much happens. That’s oddly true of Burning as well. Hae-mi’s cat remains stubbornly invisible.
Ben, whose sly smile calls to mind another literary feline, casually tells Jong-su — at the precise midpoint of the film, as it happens — “Sometimes I burn down greenhouses.” This sends Jong-su on a quest to discover the site of the latest arson. When he can’t, he starts to wonder whether it isn’t a metaphor for an even more heinous crime.
Burning features some lovely, sometimes maddening detours, including Hae-mi’s memory, possibly false, of having fallen down a well when she was a child, and how Jong-su was the one who found her.
It’s up to you whether to believe her tale, just as it’s up to Jong-su what to make of her trick of miming the act of eating a tangerine.
“Don’t think that there is a tangerine here,” she tells him as her fingers flutter over empty air. “Forget that there isn’t one.” She concludes: “The important thing is that you really want one.”
That nicely encapsulates the sleight-of-hand that is cinema, and this movie in particular. Burning is as ephemeral as a puff of smoke, and you can imagine just about anything in its gaseous curls.