"And the Oscar goes to... Parasite."
Parasite made history at the 2020 Oscars, collecting the first Best Picture award for
a non-English language film. That’s even more impressive when you consider that South
Korean cinema only began to garner major international attention in the late nineties. So what’s
the story behind the so-called Korean Wave, also known as hallyu, and where’s the best
place to start watching?
After decades of military dictatorship, Korea rapidly democratised between 1987 and 1997,
culminating in the election of liberal prime minister Kim Dae-jung. In the years that followed,
the South Korean film industry blossomed as it began to access bigger funding and distribution
opportunities, crucially developing without censorship. It’s against this backdrop that
a number of filmmakers who grew up during the military dictatorship, consuming American
mainstream cinema as well as more artistic films by Korean directors, began to emerge
as blockbuster auteurs. Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Kim Ji-woon and Lee Chang-dong
have all made films that interpret specifically Korean themes and plots through the idiom
of genre cinema, and each has achieved widespread critical and commercial success doing so
The obvious starting point for hallyu is Shiri, a spy thriller which concerns North Korean
sleeper agents working in South Korea. Far more interesting, however, is Park Chan-wook’s
JSA: Joint Security Area. The film opens with
a visually striking sequence portraying a mysterious death on the border between North
and South Korea, before flashing back to several months prior to tell the story of a unique
friendship formed between border guards on both sides. JSA differs from previous depictions
of South Korea’s fractured relationship with North Korea in several key aspects; not
only does the visual style consciously borrow from action and thriller cinema, the film’s
nuanced portrayal of North Korean soldiers was groundbreaking for its time. During the
military dictatorship, draconian censorship laws encouraged filmmakers to portray North
Koreans in an unambiguously negative, unsympathetic way. These one-dimensional portrayals removed
the risk of being seen as sympathetic to communism, a punishable offence. With the liberalisation
of South Korean politics came a new policy of co-operation toward the North, nicknamed
the Sunshine policy; among the benefits of this was the ability to explore more carefully
the lives of people in the North, even soldiers.
As one of the first
films to do this, JSA generated massive interest, and the film’s success established Park
as a director to watch.
As the commercial film industry in Korea expanded rapidly in the late 90s, the industry moved
into other genres away from the established thriller and gangster movies. Horror made
in-roads with the popular Whispering Corridors series, and following in its footsteps with
its prominent teenage female protagonist is Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters, released
in 2003. The film follows Su-mi as she arrives
home from a mental institution and tries to protect her sister Su-yeon from evil stepmother
Eun-joo. Director Kim takes this traditional Korean story as a loose starting point and
filters it through the Gothic tradition, setting the action of women struggling with madness
in an isolated, dark house, and sprinkling in a few ghosts as well. With its roaming
camera, ambiguous narrative and ominous production design, the film is reminiscent of Italian
horror maestro Dario Argento.
Kim is perhaps the biggest director of the hallyu movement yet to make an English language film,
but his back catalogue is packed with gems like Western pastiche The Good, The Bad and the Weird,
or the intense I Saw The Devil.
Hallyu also includes films with less overt genre influences. The work of Lee Chang-dong
is a prime example, although his debut, Green Fish, and the international hit Burning, from
2018, feature gangster and thriller elements respectively. Peppermint Candy, Lee’s second
film, follows Kim Yong-ho, who arrives at a reunion for a club visibly distressed
and commits suicide. The film explores his loss of innocence through a series of episodes
in his life, revealed in reverse chronological order. This jumping through time is made all
the more powerful by the clever use of visual motifs like the titular candy. Yong-ho takes
it to his old crush as she lies in a hospital bed; it’s what she used to send to him when
he was in national service. It recurs throughout the film at key moments; when last seen, they’re
on the floor, stamped on by rushing soldiers. Lee uses this clever narrative structure to
turn a character study into a political allegory; from losing a business, to torturing suspects
as a brutal police officer, to participating in the military dictatorship, Yong-ho’s
personal tragedies reflect important episodes in South Korean history. Lee built on the
success of Peppermint Candy with his next feature Oasis, but the former film’s focus
on the troubled modern history of South Korea, coupled with its powerful lead performance
from Sol Kyung-gu, makes it an excellent entry point into the artier side of hallyu.
Although hallyu is primarily associated with thriller, horror and drama, the boom in Korean
cinema also saw a rise in romances and romcoms, such as Kwak Jae-young’s My Sassy Girl from
2001. Based on a series of popular blog posts about a young man’s dysfunctional relationship
with a drunk woman he saves from falling on train tracks, it’s an irreverent mix of
screwball comedy and romance. Just make sure you don’t pick up the forgettable American
remake. And then there’s the nearly unclassifiable Save The Green Planet!, by Jang Joon-hwan,
which tells of a disturbed young man who kidnaps a pharmaceutical executive he believes to
be an alien.
With a hyperactive visual style and a bizarre plot
that keeps the audience guessing, it’s a fantastically entertaining watch.
These films represent just a fraction of hallyu; it’s a massive and varied film movement
marrying commercial sensibilities of all genres with arthouse themes, and, as Parasite has
shown, it’s still thriving today.