SF Int’l Film Festival! pt 3
I’ve been having a fantastic time at the Film Festival. Not that I’ve thought the films are so great… in fact, there have been some amazing gems, but a lot of mediocrity and some outright bombs. Still, amidst a just-broken heat wave and an absolutely iridescent light over San Francisco these past days, it was difficult to keep going indoors, or it would have been if I hadn’t been so lost in the pleasure and rhythm of a full-blown International Film Festival.
I did get a moment to catch up on my ever-rising pile of incoming periodicals and in particular want to recommend to everyone the two-part Curtis White essay in the last two issues of Orion Magazine. I referenced some of his writing a year ago, and once again, he’s come through with one of the most lucid and clearly written repudiations of the basic absurdity and self-destructiveness of modern work that I can recall reading. Check out part two especially.
Anyway, back to my capsule reviews and reactions to films:
The Old Garden
This was a FANTASTIC movie! It will get on to my top 3 or top 5 list for this festival. The plot revolves around a couple, the guy was very involved in the Gwangju uprising in 1980 in South Korea, and a half year later gets caught and imprisoned, before eventually being released two decades later. While on the run he hid out with a gorgeous, feisty, independent woman, a schoolteacher and painter, who angrily watches him leave her after hiding for months, in a rainstorm, they cling, knowing somehow it’s their last moment together… She calls him an idiot as the bus drives away (I fed you, I gave you a place to sleep, a place to hide, I let you fuck me, and you leave… Idiot!). But he’s her true love, and she’s pregnant. The structure of the film jumps back and forth in time, to the massacre, to his return from jail, her death from cancer before his release, numerous episodes among movement activists, arguments then about politics and the military dictatorship; later, one of their close friends is involved in a labor uprising, fired and repressed, after which she suicides through self-immolation. (A reference to the intense class war that continued over the next two decades, that played an important part in bringing South Korea to its present state of modernization.) The personal stories, the wrecked and altered lives admist the big historical narratives that define S. Korea since 1980–fantastic juxtapositions, nuanced portrayal of how personal and political intersect. Beautifully shot, great acting, wonderful editing. When Hoon-yee first comes back from jail to Gwangju he meets an old comrade who has been driven mad. They go to a small reunion banquet which ends in a drunken brawl, one of them saying “Life is long, but the revolution is short!”–towards the end of the film the schoolteacher says the companion line: “Life is long. History is longer!” What a great movie!
