Burning

Abstract

Burning Michael C. Reiff Burning 2018 Directed by Lee Chang-dong Distributed by Well Go USA Entertainment www.netflix.com 148 minutes It has been nearly a decade since Korean director Lee Chang-Dong directed his two hallmark works: 2010's Poetry and 2007's Secret Sunshine. Dong's artistic reputation has rested comfortably with those film's nuanced character studies, but also with his subtle use of genre, in particular the tropes of crime thrillers. Abductions and death frame and influence each film, but these genre elements are not so much explosive plot developments as quiet shocks that push Dong's characters to deeper introspection and understanding. Using this genre – filled with investigations, authority figures and a searching structure, Dong has also subtle scrutinized wider issues of control, power and privilege in modern Korean society. This holds true with Dong's most recent film, Burning, a film that continues to develop Dong's darker motifs, societal critiques and genre meditations while also integrating outside influences, from Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and F. Scott Fitzgerald to the cinematic language and omnipresence of paranoia in later Hitchcock films. Burning centers around an aspiring writer named Lee Jong-su, who is living in Seoul, South Korea when he has to return to his hometown, an agrarian exurb of the South Korean capital, after his father is arrested for attacking a local government official. Along with upkeeping the failing family farm, Jong-su also becomes re-acquainted with a grade school friend, Shin Hae-mi. After a few dates, they begin a sexual relationship, only to have it cut short when Hae-mi decides to travel to Africa - and asks Jong-su to watch her tiny apartment and feed her (seemingly invisible) cat. Upon her return to South Korea, however, Jong-su finds Hae-mi in a relationship with a wealthy Korean man she met on her travels – named only Ben – though she continues to attempt a friendship with Jong-su. Splitting his time between the rustic greenhouses and cow pens of his village and tagging along with Hae-mi and Ben on lavish dinners and parties in the penthouses of Seoul, Jong- su begins to suspect there is more to Ben than simply directionless affluence. And after a night of drinking and smoking marijuana, Ben admits to a hobby of burning other people's greenhouses, an act he compares to a deistic ritual and which he says he will re-enact soon, and close to Jong-su's house. Even worse, the next day, Hae-mi disappears. With these strange and unsettling developments, Jong-su becomes torn between two seemingly parallel paths, though ones that eventually seem to converge – one, obsessively tracking and monitoring the greenhouses in his rural community, and two, attempting to find out what happened to his former lover. Burning is based on the legendary Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's short story "Barn Burning" from his short story collection The Elephant Vanishes, and much of the short story's melancholy spirit is maintained, as well as major plot points, characters and a few key dialogue sequences (the short story itself is name-checked in the first five minutes of Burning, as department store promotors announce special deals in anticipation of the "release" of "Barn Burning" by Murakami, an interesting metatextual flourish). Running throughout much of Murakami's pop surrealist novels and spare, dream-like short stories is a wry, distanced sense of melancholy longing. Characters, even while in committed relationships, often feel lonely, rootless, adrift in modern Japanese—and often global—society. Though Burning transposes the setting and characters into South Korea, Dong maintains much of this Murakami's essence, at least in the first half of the film. Even when Jong-su is talking, visiting or making love to Hae-mi, both characters exude a certain yearning – for a version of their relationship that doesn't quite exist in the present, for a resolution to the missed opportunities in their shared past. [End Page 54] This sense of distanced longing and restlessness becomes both more explicit and wider in scope when Ben arrives; Jong-su, though often inches away from Hae-mi, has to endure the indignities of...