Peppermint Candy (Bakha satang)

Writer/director Lee Chang-dong

 

PEPPERMINT CANDY (Bakha satang)       B+                                                                       South Korea  Japan  (129 mi)  2000  d:  Lee Chang-dong

One of the early films that put South Korean cinema on the map, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, and Best New Actor prizes in the Grand Bell Awards, the Korean version of their Academy Awards, drawing international attention at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, while drawing attention to writer/director and novelist Lee Chang-dong, who would become the Korean Cultural Minister from 2003 to 2004.  What’s remarkable about this epic and emotionally wrenching film is its backwards chronology that parallels twenty years of turbulent South Korean history, viewed through a single character, Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu), whose troubled life retreats backwards into more innocent times, yet he’s psychologically scarred by traumatic events coming early in his life, becoming an exaggerated and emotionally hysterical melodrama that features a clearly unsympathetic central figure, yet the overall epic style is captivating.  Much like Hou Hsiou-hsien’s A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi) (1989), which opened new doors of Taiwanese democracy in a nation that had been under strict martial law for forty years, the key to this film is returning back to 1980 when two events reawakened the public conscience and altered the course of South Korean history.  The first occurred on October 26, 1979 when President Park Chung Hee, after almost twenty years of tyrannical rule, was assassinated by the head of his own intelligence team after ordering murderous attacks on Korean citizens who were protesting the unabated continuation of martial law, The Park Chung Hee Regime in South Korea, while the second event occurred just a few months later known as the Gwangju massacre, one of the most horrific events in Korean history, yet also one of the turning points from dictatorship to democracy, where unspeakable atrocities were committed by the military, reportedly claiming the lives of more than 2000 citizens, including bayonetting students, raping and dismembering women, while using flamethrowers against protesting students, a horrendous, catastrophic event that was largely suppressed, receiving little media attention, with the government reporting the incident was initiated by treasonous North Korean spies and leftist infiltrators.  As a result, the incident would linger for several decades, eventually leading to a pro-democracy movement that would finally prevail by the end of the century against a weakened military dictatorship, opening the doors to democracy and a prosperous middle class when this film was made.  This background information is essential in understanding the traumatic trajectory of a relative innocent who goes astray, easily becoming part of his corrupt surroundings, growing psychologically damaged by what he witnesses and experiences, where this uncompromising film, which remains the director’s most overtly political drama, offers a road map into the nation’s moral vacuum and lack of conscience, playing out in a tense, fictionalized scenario that is graphically disturbing and eerily chilling. 

One of the key criticisms of the film is the total focus on toxic masculinity at the expense of more broadened female character development, which the director has taken to heart and corrected with many of his later, more mature works.  But here Yong-so reveals narcissistic and obsessive tendencies, languishing in a misogynistic self-pity while accentuating his failures throughout his life, lamenting what he’s been forced to endure, becoming himself a reprehensible and utterly loathsome human being.  From a literary perspective, this sounds very much like the guilty conscience of a wretchedly miserable Dostoyevsky character, whose personal transgressions haunt him for the rest of his life, affecting every aspect of his daily life, perhaps best expressed in the acutely examined psychological study in Crime and Punishment.  Yong-so feels like a criminal, an outcast no longer worth living, showing disturbing suicidal tendencies at the outset of the film, absurdly joining the 20th reunion picnic of his old student group that is already in progress, having started without him, yet while he’s welcomed and embraced, he appears deranged, awkwardly sending all the wrong messages, inadvertently bumping into people, singing offensibly loud and horribly off-key karaoke, culminating with a primal scream that just draws looks of helpless confusion, where he’s simply out of kilter with the group, as if on the wrong speed, not even remotely fitting in.  So he stumbles out into the shallow river, pretty much making a fool out of himself, before climbing the railroad trestles and standing on the tracks awaiting a train, where his mindset appears to be a death wish.  While others show their concern and warn him to come down, especially with the sudden arrival of a train, but he ignores their pleas, grotesquely setting the tone for what follows.  The introductory credit sequence is deserving of mention, as there’s a tiny blip in the center of the screen that grows larger and larger, eventually becoming a recognizable train tunnel as we watch a train passing from complete darkness into the alluring bright light of the opening.  Without knowing it at the time, that opening marks the scene of the crime.  Train track interludes with a pleasant musical theme also mark the transition between time periods, curiously shot from the back of the train and then run backwards, so traces of smoke or people walking and riding bikes adjacent to the tracks are seen moving backwards, offering a surreal twist, each segment marked with a chapter title identifying the time and place, revealing seven different episodes beginning in 1999 and ending in 1979, each shedding light on Yong-so’s personal history while also offering comment on the formation of a national identity, subverting the idea of development, as if in a perpetual state of evolving.  By always moving backwards, viewers are retreating back to the original source of the trauma, with an emphasis on what went terribly wrong in the man’s life, his mandatory military service leading to his involvement in the massacre, his failed business decisions and doomed career choices, his disastrous marriage to Hong-ja (Kim Yeo-jin), or his broken relationship with his first love, Sun-im (Moon So-ri).

One interesting aspect of this picture is the attempt to bring to life historical issues that have been obscured by political repression, using one man as a kind of Biblical Job figure, as he is tried and tested throughout, finding disaster both behind and ahead of him, enduring overwhelming challenges, none particularly successfully, yet his ordeal humanizes the viewer’s relationship with history, offering a rare insight into such troubled times.  Even today, there are unanswered questions about the Gwangju massacre, yet this film, and several others as well, has helped the younger generation become more knowledgeable about the history that changed South Korea into what it is today.  Yong-ho represents a kind of ordinary everyman who can’t forget the past trauma as it continues to affect his life, angry at himself and at the world, using violence as a way to forget, thinking it will help him heal, becoming a policeman, for instance, yet ends up pressured by his peers to go overboard, routinely brutalizing subjects with torture techniques, becoming psychologically distanced from his own humanity.  When he discovers his wife has cheated on him, he kicks and beats her mercilessly, exposing the fact Korea is a patriarchal society with a long history of domestic violence against women.  Violence, in fact, has become synonymous with South Korean cinema, with Park Chan-wook, a former film critic, and his Vengeance Trilogy becoming one of the most notoriously acclaimed purveyors of torture porn, where his immaculate framing exposes grotesque and graphically barbaric subject matter.  The more understated Lee Chang-dong has gone in a different direction, where his films are more novelesque, driven by subtlety and extremely detailed character studies, offering a more poetic view of cinema, becoming a kind of poet laureate for his country.  Ostensibly a morality tale, he somehow mixes hope with pessimism, inspired by the typically Korean notion of Han.  It’s worth noting that Yong-ho was lulled into a false sense of security, as his plan that violence would help him forget is doomed from the outset, becoming a total failure, leading only to further depression and suicidal thoughts, believing his life is worthless and meaningless.  His sins stand for the sins of the nation, for which there is no antidote.  It’s also curious how the one character that follows him in nearly every episode is Sun-im, the girl he tries so hard to forget, reminding him of his younger days of innocence.  We see her in various stages of her life as well, suggesting her memory continues to haunt him, always longing to be with the one you love, often indistinguishable between reality and a dream, even finding a girl in a bar who pretends to be her.  We’re privy to his own crudeness when he personally rejects her, intentionally groping another woman in front of her, thoroughly humiliating her.  We are reminded of an interrogation scene that turns gruesome, when a prisoner defecates all over himself, with Yong-ho furiously scrubbing his hands afterwards, but a fellow officer amusingly reminds him that smell is very difficult to get rid of, suggesting some memories are extremely difficult to wash away.  The film suggests our lives are forever connected to history, where all attempts to forget about the past only lead to further despair.  The naïve innocence of the final segment is positively stunning in its tenderness, seemingly disconnected to everything that came before, where Yong-ho is simply a different person, a wide-eyed student filled with aspirations and dreams, which are quickly altered by the savage inhumanity he faces.     

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Lana Turner and John Garfield on the set with director Tay Garnett (right)

The director (left) with Turner and Garfield

Turner and Garfield on the set

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE                      A-                   

USA  (113 mi)  1946  d:  Tay Garnett

With my brains and your looks, we could go places.

—Frank Chambers (John Garfield)

Rarely has an author hit the Hollywood trifecta like the success mystery writer James M. Cain had in successive years with Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Michael Curtiz’ Mildred Pierce (1945), and this lurid adaptation of his first 1934 novel in 1946, largely inspired by the infamous Ruth Snyder murder case in 1927 (Ruth Snyder | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers).  These films were vehicles for major movie star heroines like Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford, who won an Oscar after she was unceremoniously dropped by MGM, the studio known for producing lavish musical spectacles, now putting their weight behind blonde bombshell Lana Turner in one of her most memorable roles.  Turner had a highly publicized yet disastrous personal life marred by tragedy, married 8 times, yet none of her marriages lasted more than four years, so the salaciousness of the material only whetted the public’s appetite both for her and the film.  Due to censorship fears from the overwhelming influence of the Hays Code, (Hays Code: Rules, Censorhip and Hollywood Movies ***), it took more than a decade for MGM to bring this film into light in the United States, no doubt influenced by the success of the earlier Cain depictions, this one adapted by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch, with versions released elsewhere first, including Chenal’s hard-to-find LE DERNIER TOURNANT (1939) in France and Visconti’s celebrated neorealist OSSESSIONE (1942) in Italy, with MGM blocking all prints from American release, where Visconti’s film wasn’t seen in the United States until 1977, and then in an abbreviated version.  Excellent modern era versions exist as well, including Berlin-school director Christian Petzold’s Jerichow (2008), but this American version is the most accurate rendition to the literary source, one of the more important crime novels of the 20^th century, often viewed as the definitive postwar noir, showcasing the distinctive features of the genre, where a femme fatale along with an alienated and tragic antihero conspire to murder her husband, driven by lustful desires and animalistic instincts, creating a murky aesthetic of amoral confusion, revealed in a narrated voiceover recalling past events.  One aspect of the book that was never translated into the film release was its connection to the Great Depression, as it was written during nationwide bank failures, where it was commonplace for people to be out of work.  The effect this has on Lana Turner’s character is profound, yet it’s easier for viewers to get wrapped up in her own fall from grace.  What distinguishes this fatal attraction from typical noir films is their lack of sophistication and complete unfamiliarity with criminal mentality, making them just ordinary people doomed by poverty, lack of opportunity, and self-delusion, emblematic of the lower-middle class misery and the urgent desire to get out of it by taking an easy path, suggesting how easy it is to lose one’s bearings to modern day temptations.  John Garfield’s drifter, Frank Chambers, was a Depression era survivor, using a combination if street smarts and charm along with a handful of useful skills, as he was used to adapting to circumstances to fit in wherever he went.  Having grown up in the slums of New York, Garfield was familiar with hard times, going on to make films like Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947) and Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), both reflecting the fallout from the downward spiral of capitalism, with Garfield playing cocky, self-assured loners who are outside the mainstream of society, the kind of guys that break the rules in order to get ahead, often disregarding the interests of others, where Garfield was viewed as a working class hero, a kid literally from the streets who became a success in Hollywood bringing a rough-edged authenticity to his characters.  But he was also a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare that created a Hollywood blacklist on November 25, 1947, where his real crime was growing up poor, with socialist organizations part of ordinary life, offering a form of social protest against the disillusionment caused by the social and economic hardships of the Depression in the 30’s.  The Committee, however, hounded Garfield to his premature death, as after his original testimony, he learned they were reviewing the transcripts for possible perjury charges, where he died in 1952 at the age of 39 of a heart attack, allegedly aggravated by the stress of the blacklisting.  Garfield is the prototype for the young, rebellious characters of the 50’s like James Dean, Marlon Brando, or Montgomery Clift, young men trying to make sense out of the uncertainties of the atomic age when the world around them made little sense, often feeling mixed-up with no moral footing.  Garfield was doing the same during the Depression era, where survival was always the first order of business.   

With Cain’s novel serving as a source of inspiration for the 1942 Albert Camus philosophical masterpiece on existentialism, The Stranger (L’Etranger), Garfield narrates his own story as drifter Frank Chambers, where we immediately sense the existential rootlessness of his transience, moving from place to place with ease, having no place to really call home, “It was on a side road outside of Los Angeles.  I was hitchhiking from San Francisco down to San Diego, I guess.  A half hour earlier, I’d thumbed a ride.”  Stopping at a roadside diner and gas station with a giant Help Wanted sign out front, both the film and the novel bookend the story with district attorney Kyle Sackett (Leon Ames), who has offered Frank a ride into the town of Twin Oaks in the foothills just outside Los Angeles, where he is greeted by the kindly middle-aged proprietor Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway) who instantly takes a liking to him, showing him around the place and offering him the job.  But the intrigue begins when Frank is left alone while Nick serves a customer, allowing Lana Turner as Cora Smith to make her intensely erotic entrance, a voluptuous platinum blonde dressed all in white, wearing snugly fitting white shorts and a halter top, with a turban on her head, where she has the kind of raw beauty pulp fiction writers clamor for, probably inventing the term male gaze to describe the way the camera leers at her, following the outlines of her body, immersing viewers in Frank’s voyeuristic point of view, becoming the most sexually charged moment of the film.  Frank’s voiceover narration is bluntly revealing, describing her as the kind of sultry woman a man immediately craves, hooked just by the sight of her, hypnotized by her smoldering sensuality with the face and figure to drive a man into doing anything to have her, leaving him helpless without her, where he’s willing to stop at nothing, even killing a man just to possess her.  Frank can do little else but stare, certain he has found the woman of his dreams as she slinks away, but his jaw drops in bewilderment when he discovers she is Nick’s wife.  What he quickly discovers is the predicament she’s in, as Frank owns the restaurant, the car, and all other assets, while he also expects his wife to work for no compensation, which she does, feeling powerless and exploited, tired of forever being treated as insignificantly small, forever smothering her larger ambitions to be something more.  Dressed in her white cook’s uniform, with the restaurant name prominently appearing on the sleeve, she resembles hired help, doing what the boss tells her to do, incapable of establishing her own identity.  It’s a loveless marriage, as she never loved him from the outset, but felt economically safe and secure, which she felt at the time was the best option, where Nick always felt she’d come around, but not in the current circumstances where she’s humiliated and devalued on a daily basis.  With Frank entering the picture, his virile masculinity unleashes her pent-up sexuality and offers her a choice she previously didn’t have, feeling confined, even imprisoned, rarely ever leaving the premises, quickly establishing a sizzling romance, somehow avoiding the book’s graphic depictions of violence, sexuality, and sadism, instead relying upon late night drives to the beach in Nick’s car.  Nick is the odd man out in this three-way affair, older, with a tendency to get tipsy, missing the obvious signs taking place right in front of him, even encouraging the young couple to dance together, to laugh and have fun, with each one devising ways to remove him from the picture.  While saturated in a pervading mood of hopeless fatalism, accentuated by movie posters that screamed “Their Love was a Flame that Destroyed!,” what stands out is the sympathetic portrayal of their criminal acts, as the respective viewpoints of Frank and Cora remain the centerpiece of the film, both before and after crimes are committed.  This takes us into Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment territory, lending itself to cause and effect psychoanalytic interpretation even as the perpetrators themselves refuse self-reflection and are in absolute denial of the psychology, with viewers fully aware of their guilt, yet still somehow pulling for them.

What’s apparent in the landscape is the restricted universe, the ever-retreating space of the American West, with an expanding urban sprawl in an oppressively sunny Southern California that constricts all open space, where the setting could be anywhere, as the two have simply reached the end of the road, leaving no other way out, where nothing else matters except the two of them, obsessed by overcoming their circumstances, becoming all that matters to each other, as everything else is blocked out and of little consequence.  Frank’s mobility in moving from place to place has led him nowhere, where his freedom has been a mirage, as it’s all been an escape from the harsh realities that envelop him.  Cora is driven by an ambitious desire to be somebody, to make something of her life, to come out from under Nick’s shadow and no longer be saddled by wearing a cheap uniform, the same dreams and desires that drive Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, both exhibiting a fierce individuality.  While Crawford is motivated by economic freedom and success, Cora’s views are shaped by being deprived that opportunity, always feeling imprisoned, even by her good looks, fighting off men since she was fourteen, as she’s always had to escape the unwanted attention of men.  Freeing herself from the suffocating social restrictions leads her to turn in desperation to Frank, who offers the illusion of freedom, where it’s the two of them against the world, yet they’re both in the same predicament, where all they have is the drudgery of work, which brings no happiness at all and no chance whatsoever in obtaining anything more.  Smoldering in frustration, they devise multiple plots to remove Nick from the picture, first escaping together on the road, quickly realizing they have no money to build a better life, then devising crude murder plots.  The first is unsuccessful, but lands Nick in the hospital in a close call, drawing the attention of Sackett.  Their second bite of the apple is disastrously ill-advised, surely there’s a better way, with hundreds of movies offering better murder options, but this film is not about the perfect murder, instead it’s about the willingness to venture into the depths of a moral abyss to obtain what you desire, crossing the line, knowing it’s wrong, but doing it anyway, irrespective of the consequences.  The courtroom sequences with an always suspicious Sackett and the deviously underhanded methods of defense attorney Arthur Keats (Hume Cronyn) are less than impressive, generating little interest, despite the weird legal maneuvers involved, bringing their whirlwind romance to a dead stop, only to be resurrected again in short order, with Nick now out of the picture, but the two can’t help themselves, as they’re too devious, losing all faith in one another to make it work.  Their jealous and stiflingly distrustful instincts bring out the worst in each other, both feeling bitter and pessimistic, engaging in spiteful retribution that borders on emotional paralysis, spending all their efforts stymying the other, going nowhere fast, becoming an unsentimental and unglamorized portrayal of lust, murder, betrayal, and justice, guided by the allure of unbridled sex, yet drowning in disillusionment, adhering to the novel’s central themes of good and evil or sex and power, discovering how easy it is to confuse the issue.  Striving for freedom from protracted social and economic constraints, hoping to eradicate the suffocating noose around their necks, their questionable decisions all but insure the noose is only pulled even tighter.  While thoroughly entertaining, Garnett has never been a first rate director, and the overall melodramatic cinematic style is fairly conventional, filled with a smattering of contrivances, including an excessive amount of moralizing at the end, lacking the stylistic edge, dark shadows, and sharp camera angles of film noir, yet the novel’s bleak cynicism and lurid subject matter takes us into the dangerous realms of film noir territory, with powerfully impactful performances from the two leads who literally bare their souls, especially Garfield, who exhibits such a carefree style, but the staggering beauty of the film is in the power of suggestion, where there is a strong, palpable atmosphere of sexual tension, created almost entirely through dialogue and performance, yet the bold sensuality onscreen is by implication, nearly entirely non-verbal, inviting viewers to fill in the salacious details.