Why is it wrong? From the first frames, subconsciously causing sad sympathy (maybe such an intimate gossip of old photos on the credits prepared?), it seems that this guy will have no place in life. Everything is not easy for those who on the train like to dangerously expose the wind in the vestibule. Here is the soul mate in the next one - a thin, curved figure, a mysterious stranger who suddenly missed her handkerchief. The attempt to protect the girl from harassment turns into a fight, and then the departure of the train. Passing a woman, unsuccessfully catching up with a train. Not a good start to a new life after demobilization.
When the face of the earth changes faster than the life of one generation, you begin to feel older than you are. It is better not to return to abandoned places, but what to do if you are waiting there, hope for you? A mother serves in someone else’s house, a middle brother is disabled, a sister is a prostitute and sponsors you with her dirty income. It seems that the world pushed you out – you returned from the army, where everything is extremely simple, for on command, albeit constantly in view of the war with the North. On a citizen there is an imaginary freedom in which there are so no supports that you walk, staggering, you are chatty, you stumble upon everything, and most easily - on other people's fists. And you don't know how to do anything special, and for some reason you say stubbornly that you don't have a dream. Just talking about your dream hurts. The father has died, a once large and friendly family is scattered; in a small dwelling on which new buildings are advancing like troops, the poor mother cleans her vegetables and stares at the TV, the best friend of the poor with money and soul. No, I still want to look out the window, where the weeping willow hanging with damp strands, until it has surrendered its place, so wide and high, as if its top will lead to heaven, curtain its branches will obscure from reality. I want to lie on the bridge, remembering probably the best thing in life. The best will not come back - when the natural family is broken, criminal families are formed.
The film, unfolding slowly, does not look like a melodrama or a detective. The story of the “little man”, his big crime and great love, he is, rather, the same “everyday morning drama”, stretching for the entire duration of the tape. Seoul, illuminated with trinkets and window lights, like a huge nightclub; the ruins of other people's dreams, broken and broken; creepy backyards where people disappear forever; her home, the shelter of her drunken longing and self-contempt, painted with a gentle golden, unearthly lilac light. A house squeezed by new buildings, a man from the past, squeezed by the “new Koreans”. Hero and heroine, both on maintenance, both used.
Released in 1997, the debut film of the future creator of the masterpieces “Oasis” and “The Secret Shining” captured the very point of the economic crisis in the country. The breakdown of the eighties and nineties, when agricultural South Korea was transformed into an industrial monster, became, as everywhere, the breaking, grinding of individuals. Those who have “no jobs, no dreams”, but need fast and big money, in such periods have to serve those whose dreams are sky-high and cynical. The best serve too faithfully, too dangerous to life, their own and others. And so appropriately, everything that happens on the screen brightens up the lyrical soundtrack, giving a simple story a gentle blues character, then piercing, nostalgic, if nostalgia can indeed be called a longing for childhood, distant, pure and irresponsible. Perhaps it is possible – childhood is our homeland.
God, what will happen to me... This whisper, prayer, lamentation in the almost impeccable Russian language of Korean, or Nastasya Filippovna, or Aliki from Solovyov’s “Assa”, a content, a singer from a nightclub, beloved, to the end in a white dress, not that of a bride, not that of a widow who put on mourning – the true musical accompaniment of the whole film, its embodied in words fear and meaning. Russia, the country of all sorrowful beginnings, with its nineties, everyday dramas of its unkissed guys and suffering prostitutes, the director looks at it as in a mirror of what is happening in his native country. That’s why the words of Vysotsky’s song, which break from drunken lips at an undecided holiday, become a clumsy, but natural requiem for those who fell in a war, no less terrible than that, former and again possible, against their own, with weapons in their hands.
The losses of the nineties in internal, almost invisible wars. Who will remember them? New buildings are expanding, the country is recovering from the crisis. So the family came together, as the hero dreamed, so she opened the restaurant planned by him, so she treats her killers in it. No, the film is not about love and not about crime – about the fact that even the most ridiculous life is worth memories and tears. There's a collage of photos on the wall where it's still small and careless. Children play, soon somewhere far from them, will run, most likely, their little relative. Still pumps gentle green strands persistent wind willow, swimming somewhere in the water uncaught green fish. The same air and the same water.
But he didn’t come back from the fight.
10 out of 10