The 12th International Women’s Film Festival in Seoul concluded this past Thursday. Among the many films shown was the Korean feature  PAJU, which had a theatrical run here and is now available on DVD. Like much of world cinema, Korean cinema is still dominated by male directors and by themes revolving around masculinity (see Kyung Hyun Kim’s THE REMASCULINIZATION OF KOREAN CINEMA). According to Korean film scholar Ahn Ji-Hye, before 1996, there were only five female directors to have made a feature film in Korea. This is why Lim Soon-Rye’s THREE FRIENDS (1996) is considered such a milestone. Since then, there has been more female directors making their debuts, but the percentage remains well under 10 %. And as of 2007, there remained only 29 female directors in Korean feature film history, an rather astonishingly low number. Thus, PAJU is still a rarity, the debut film of a female Korean director that has received distribution beyond the festival circuit. Park had previously worked as as assistant to Hong Sang-soo, and it does have in common with Hong a challenging narrative style that forces viewers to be attentive and consistently reevaluate and reconstruct the story that is unfolding. But her film is far more accessible in style than his work and is closer to popular Korean auteurs like Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. It is also a more political work, calling to mind some of the films of the first Korean New Wave prior to 1996, after which the art cinema of Korea moved into more personal territory. (SOME SPOILERS AHEAD)

The film begins with the character of Eun-mo in a cab, having arrived back in the small town of Paju. After this short scene, there is a flashback to 8 years earlier, and we are introduced to Joong-sik. We are given a scene almost out of the opening of Lars von Trier’s ANTICHRIST (although without the slow-motion, black and white, classical music faux-art style): he begins to have sex with a married woman whose husband is in prison (we later assume for political reasons), but they are interrupted when her baby spills hot water on himself.

After this trauma, he moves from Seoul to Paju and begins teaching a church group consisting of teenage girls, one of which is Eun-mo. Soon Joong-sik begins a relationship with her older sister Eun-soo, which deeply angers Eun-mo (although we are not sure why). The film then returns to the present day, where we learn Eun-soo has been killed in what is believed to be an accident. She had an insurance policy in her husband Joong-sik’s name, but he signs over the $100,000 to Eun-mo. At the same time, Joong-sik is the head of a residents group trying to avoid being removed from their homes by government/ corporate/ gangster redevelopment interests. All of this occurs in the first half of the film, and is not presented in an easy or elegant manner. The viewer has a difficult time piecing everything together because so many of the relationships between the characters are implied and only become clearer as the narrative keeps progressing. But this does aid Park in creating a small mystery film within this tale of personal and political drama. Thus, we are thrust again back in time, 7 years later, to Joong-sik and Eun-mo’s marriage, her death, and the developing relationship between Joong-sik and Eun-mo. By the conclusion, most is made clear but it is by no means simple. Each character continues to have secret motivations that we and perhaps even they do not know.

Park as writer-director has constructed a modern day tale that is also a throwback to the genre of the female Gothic, which traces back to 19th century literature and was a major staple of Hollywood cinema of the 1940s (Hitchcock’s REBECCA and SUSPICION, the adaptation of JANE EYRE, many of the works of Max Ophuls). In these tales, a young woman has to come to terms with her sexuality through a relationship with an older man who may or may not be trying to harm her. In many ways, the female Gothic is the inverse of the male melodramas of film noir, in which masculinity is threatened by an exotic female force. Joong-sik thus functions as a kind of “homme fatale”, a mysterious and erotic force that Eun-mo can never quite understand (she explicitly states this lack of understanding near the conclusion). What is intriguing here is that Joong-sik is not the force of traditional patriarchal authority, but rather is an activist fighting against those in power. Nevertheless, he is still a symbolic father figure to both Eun-mo and the people he leads, and admits at the film’s conclusion his foolishness in not comprehending his actions and their impact. Park thus is conducting a critique of the Korean left (particularly its unquestioned patriarchal leader) while also not eliminating politics from the discussion, which has been increasingly the case in the last decade. The thematics here are both a deconstruction of the heroic male rebels of Park Kwang-su as well as recalling thematically (but not styistically) the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, especially GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN and GOODBYE SOUTH GOODBYE.

In terms of style, PAJU reminded me strongly of the two most popular Korean auteurs of the moment, Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. There is a mixture of more conventionally shot and edited scenes combined with more elaborate long takes, most notably an almost two-minute long shot of Eun-mo walking through the neighborhood of the houses being destroyed, a sequence with strong and deliberate connotations of the war film genre.

Park Chan-ok is certainly trying to make a film that aims beyond a festival audience, while also showing off her technical flair as a filmmaker, and as a debut feature, it is most impressive in this regard. The stylistic flourishes are used very effectively and work with the thematic points she is trying to make. PAJU is both a realistic tale grounded in believable characters and social situations and yet one that feels very expressionist, like it is being filtered through the psychology and emotions of the various characters. Many shots contain seemingly artificial and theatrical lighting, yet anyone who has lived in Korea can recall moments or snapshots that look very much like those in the film.

If I were to have any critique of the film, it would be similar to the reservations I have about both Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. This is a movie that is very well-made and well-acted and with a story worth telling, but it does feel manipulative in both its narrative and stylistic form. It is certainly arguable that this type of manipulation may be needed in producing a mass culture product at this junction in cinema history, but it also keeps PAJU from being among the truly great works of Korean cinema.

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