Last week I reviewed a film often considered as one of the first of the Korean New Wave, Park Kwang-su’s 1988 CHILSU AND MANSU. This week I want to discuss a film from the opposite end of the movement, Jang Sun-woo’s 1996 A PETAL, which is released as the Korean New Wave is ending and the less political New Korean Cinema is beginning. Like Park Kwang-su, Jang Sun-woo made his first feature in 1988 and was a director very prominent during the years of the Korean New Wave. He continued into the late 1990s, making provocative works like TIMELESS, BOTTOMLESS, BAD MOVIE (1997) and LIES (1999) which challenged the local censors, but in 2002 he produced a major box office flop, THE RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL, and has retired from filmmaking ever since. In my opinion, this is one of the major losses for not only Korean cinema, but all of the film-loving world. I think that both A PETAL and LIES are among the great films of the 1990s, and while LIES is readily available on DVD both in Korea and in North America, A PETAL is still enormously difficult to find. The Korean Film Council has made a DVD available for scholars, but no commercial release is currently in print. This review is written partly with a desire to see the film rediscovered.

When first released,  A PETAL received a great deal of attention because it was the first narrative feature film to deal with the May 1980 Kwangju Massacre, a major Korean historical trauma that had been repressed for many years. At the time of release, Kwangju was very much on the mind of the nation. South Korea’s first civilian president, Kim Young Sam, had ordered the trial of former presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, partly for their involvement in the Kwangju massacre. As a result, many documentaries on the incident aired on Korean television, and it featured as part of the television mini-series “Sandglass”. Jang’s take, however, was quite unique and very much his own idiosyncratic vision. Over the opening credits, Jang shows documentary footage of the massacre accompanied by a Korean pop song of the period from which the film gets its title. This juxtaposition creates one of the great opening scenes of Korean film, and throughout Jang shows his skill in creating memorable sound/image fusions.

We see a flashback to a young girl singing the song in front of her brother and his friends, and then the film returns to the recording as we see the brother’s friends in the present, on a train in search of the missing girl of their now decreased friend. There are flashbacks throughout back to this moment of the young girl singing, a kind of lost innocence that can never be regained.

Then the main narrative begins, as we see the young girl follow a working class laborer along a barren stretch of shoreline. Believing him to be her deceased brother, she continues to stay with him even as he rapes and abuses her. Typical of Jang, there is a strong sado-masochistic relationship at work, intimately linked to the historical situation of a nation abused by its patriarchal authority figures. As we eventually learn through Jang’s editing, the girl endures the abuse at least partly out of her own guilt at witnessing and, in her mind, helping cause the death of her mother during the massacre. Thus instead of a straightforward historical recreation of history, Jang does something much different, reminiscent of an art cinema take on historical trauma such as Alain Resnais’ HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959).

During another rape scene later in the film, the girl re-imagines her pursuit by a military helicopter through an animated sequence in which she is saved by a man on a white horse. Thus the impulses of both self-punishment as well as a desire for her lost heroic male figure seemingly drive the girl. It is important to note that this idealized male figure is her brother, not her father, who is never mentioned. Symbolically, it is as if this typical working class male takes on this role of the brutal father figure representative of the state, a metaphor for the way in which power can be carried out by those it is also repressing.

As the narrative continues, the man eventually reforms, trying to take on a more paternal and caring role rather than a brutalizing one. However, the sins of the past, both personal and historical, cannot be erased and have to be confronted.

This leads to the movie’s climax, an extended flashback to May 21, 1980 that takes place at the brother’s grave. The girl, in what Jang has called a kind of shamanistic ritual exorcism, tells the story of that day as, against her mother’s wishes, she follows her mother into town as  she tries to join an anti-government demonstration, spurred on by the recent death of her son, who has been conscripted into the army as punishment for his dissident activities.

Amid the general violence and massacring of the protesters, the mother is shot and killed as she reaches back to help her fallen daughter. In order to get free, the girl has to violently break the grip her mother has on her arm by breaking her fingers. She is only able to escape because the soldiers assume she is dead and toss her with other dead bodies in the back of a truck, an image that clearly calls to mind the holocaust. Against this tale, the man can only watch shamefully, and eventually he himself will go mad, hoping for the girl’s return.

Even though the girl’s story does provide a kind of catharsis, it does not solve anything in terms of the narrative. The brother’s friends are never able to find her, and she ultimately remains elusive. It can be argued that she is not really a character in the traditional sense, but rather a part of a guilty national conscience that has begun to move on and forget the past without really dealing with it. As many critics have argued, she is something of a phantom, and we can even question how much she really exists. Towards the conclusion, the friends believe they see her sleeping on a train, but it is revealed to be simply a old woman. She is also something of a zombie, rising from the back of that truck to haunt and pursue and infect the society that killed her.

The ending has one of the brother’s friends at the grave site. In voiceover, he delivers the film’s final lines, expressing a desire to ask the audience to confront rather than repress the ugliness of its historical past: “If you pass the cemetery and happen to meet a girl wandering about the area, just ignore her. Then, if one day she approaches you, don’t be afraid. All she needs is a moment of your concern.” Coming at the end the Korean New Wave, Jang seems to be acknowledging this lack of historical memory, a lack that would only grow in the decade and a half since this film’s release. Jang himself has disappeared from the scene, but there remain directors inspired by this same message, such as Im Sang-soo in THE PRESIDENT’S LAST BANG and Lee Chang-dong in PEPPERMINT CANDY. Writing about Jang, Lee Chang-dong expressed his admiration for Jang’s ability to “give things a shake”. Although he is no longer active, revisiting films like  A PETAL can still provide a needed social-aesthetic jolt.

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