
Jong-su, an unassuming delivery boy and wannabe writer (played by Yoo Ah-in), in Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning.”
The so-called Korean “new wave,” which hit American theaters around the turn of the century, has lingered now largely in a few distinct flavors: the dry relationship comedy of Hong Sang-soo (Woman on the Beach, Night and Day), the balls-out CGI genre-stuff of Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer), the clockwork Grand Guignol of Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden).
The fourth major voice in the surge has been easily the least congenial, and so the least known: Lee Chang-dong, whose films (Oasis, Secret Sunshine, Poetry) are prickly dramas of incendiary familial and social cataclysm, emotionally on fire and yet often mysterious and overtly poetic. Lee’s movies put both their characters and their audience’s expectations of narrative meaning under ferocious pressure, and they always echo with scathing critiques of contemporary Korean culture—its disaffected youth, its hollow commercialism, its disconnection from bygone values.
His new film, Burning, is his tetchiest yet, a movie of hauntings and unproven lies and unknown unknowns. The modern sense of disassociation is pure Lee; even so, ellipses are thick on the ground in the short story it’s based on, “Barn Burning” by Haruki Murakami. In that story, the narrator recounts meeting an old girlfriend and her blithely wealthy new mate, who after getting stoned admits he periodically, whimsically, burns down derelict barns for fun. Why he does, or why it matters to the narrator, is left vague; time passes, the girl vanishes, and the narrator spends years watching for burned barns, without knowing why.
Lee doubles down on the story’s hanging questions, backlighting an uncertain 21st-century cultural moment in the process.
Lee doubles down on the story’s hanging questions, backlighting an uncertain 21st-century cultural moment in the process. The ball starts rolling when Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), an unassuming delivery boy and wannabe writer in Seoul, is wooed off the street by Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), an erstwhile childhood friend working as a scantily-clad sidewalk hawker.
Hae-mi is soon going to Kenya on a kind of touristy walkabout; Jong-su has to soon move into his father’s empty farmhouse. (We eventually learn the aging father is in jail for assaulting a local official—for the second time.) Still, they hook up, occasioning the first of Lee’s patented lyrical asides: Hae-mi’s tiny apartment only gets a fleeting sliver of reflected sunlight each day, and during sex, Jong-su sees it, glinting on a closet wall, shining and glowing and then disappearing.
The absences proliferate: Hae-mi convincingly mimes eating an imaginary tangerine, claiming the trick is not to picture a tangerine, but “forget there isn’t one.” She does go to Africa, but the cat Jong-su is enlisted to care for never appears, and despite the frequented catbox, may not actually exist. When Hae-mi returns, it’s with a new boyfriend, Ben (Steven Yeun, the Korean-American actor from The Walking Dead), the slick, smug nouveau riche guy from Murakami’s story, complete with TV-ish good looks, a Porsche, and no visible means of support.
The three fall into a social routine that Jong-su is either too passive or too polite to resist, landing him at parties filled with Ben’s patronizing friends, where the naive Hae-mi is regarded as the low-class entertainment. (Lee nails it one shot: as Hae-mi regales with Africa stories, Jong-su watches Ben, who smiles calmly when caught in a stifling yawn.)
As Yoo plays him, Jong-su seems more than a little lost and disaffected himself, but soon enough his suspicions arise, wondering how Ben can afford to live as it does. “So many Gatsbys in Korea,” he mutters. Soon after, Ben confesses, stoned before a sunset at Jong-su’s farm, that he routinely enjoys burning down greenhouses. Jong-su is as mystified as we are, and that’s where things become entirely unknowable.
Jong-su begins worrying about the many greenhouses in his region, and checks them as he jogs; at the same time, Hae-mi stops responding to his messages, and seems to have vanished. Is Ben just a socioeconomic scourge or an actual psycho? Jong-su starts tracking Ben, searching for the girl that can’t be found, and the burning greenhouse that’s never ignited.
Burning is something of a bolero, laying low for much of its two-and-a-half-hour length, and then rising to a crescendo of irrational violence.
“What kind of story are you writing?” Ben asks an interrogatory Jong-su at one point, meaning that the story we’re watching is being written by a protagonist who never knows exactly what’s going on, and will, in effect, decide the shape and meaning of it in the end.
Lee loves indeterminacy—his films are all, ultimately, exhaustive dramas about how much we’ll never know about those around us.
Lee loves indeterminacy nearly as much as he loves dramatic bloodletting—each of his films, including the 1999 generational totem-epic Peppermint Candy (forever unreleased in the U.S.), is built out of fracturing subjectivities and missing information. Oasis, Secret Sunshine and Poetry are all, ultimately, exhaustive dramas about how much we’ll never know about those around us, a gimlet-eyed position brought on with moral force.
Movies often provide us with the gift of absurd omniscience, of which we should always be a little skeptical. When do we actually ever understand everything? Burning endlessly suggests questions without determining answers, and no film this year has so potently evoked the spirit of our slippery, maddening modern moment.