Burning
(South Korea, 148 min.)
Dir. Lee Chang-dong, Writ. Lee Chang-dong, Jungmi Oh
Starring: Ah-In Yoo, Steven Yeun, Jong-seo Jeon
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| Ah-In Yoo, Jong-Seo Jeon and Steven Yeun star in Burning |
Burning is a slow
and difficult film. South Korea's Oscar bid is lethargic even by the standard with which one
approaches a film by auteur Lee Chang-dong (Secret Sunshine, Poetry).
Lee has mastered the art of slow cinema, rarely making a movie that clocks in
under two hours and twenty minutes, so what Burning
lacks in immediate payoff it enjoys in long-term gain. See it in a theatre
and leave your phone behind—or, if watching Burning
at home, turn the phone off, remove the battery, and leave both parts in
different rooms. This is the kind of movie from which one can easily be
distracted, since the action happens almost imperceptibly in Lee’s carefully
measured frames. Miss not a beat, lest ye be lost forever. The film is a slow
burn with a sting that creeps up a day later.
Hae-mi is more of a free spirit, though, and she goes on a
trip to Africa shortly after their friendship (with benefits) begins. Jong-su,
quickly whipped, dutifully agrees to visit her apartment and feed her cat,
Boil, while she’s away. Here’s the thing, though: Hae-mi’s apartment is smaller
and more cramped than a dorm room. Lee offers a grin without a cat in his playful
game of showing and telling, of which he tends to do neither, and Jong-su sees
everything in the apartment except the little kitty. Boil seems to eat his
food, leaves a poop, and vanish into thin air.
The absence of the cat is significant, especially since
Jong-su spends a lot of time in Hae-mi’s apartment while she’s away. He basks
in the brief flicker of sunshine that emerges through her porthole of a window
and fondly enjoys the view while masturbating in her room. He leaves his scent
all over Hae-mi’s abode in her absence.
Lee kicks things up a notch in the second act when Hae-mi
returns from Africa and introduces Jong-su to a friend she met during her
travels. The new stranger is Ben (Steven Yeun) and he is everything that
Jong-su is not: hot, confident, rich, and adventurous. Jong-su becomes
instantly jealous of his cosmopolitan rival for Hae-mi’s affection. Tension
mounts as Lee cuts back and forth between Ah-In’s blank, innocent face and Yeun’s
darker, edgier charm. Battle lines are drawn in an unspoken feud of toxic
masculinity.
The centrepiece of the film comes quickly as Hae-mi and Ben
make a surprise visit to Jong-su’s family farm. (The young man looks after the
property while his father stands trial for assaulting a police officer, but
we’ll get to that later.) The threesome splits some wine and passes around a
reefer as they await the sunset. Sex is in the air, as is often the case with
young inebriated adults (especially in the movies), and the setting sunlight
hits Hae-mi just right. She performs a seductive dance, not for the boys, but
more for herself, although one can appreciate that some viewers might fault Lee
for falling into a male gaze fantasy trope in the film’s strongest moment.
As Hae-mi waves her hands in the air, flowing with the wind
to the tune of Miles Davis’s jazzy trumpet on “Générique,” Burning offers the best of Lee’s art for slow cinema. This pensive
moment of ecstasy and longing offers a hypnotic interlude as the warm sunset ballet
provides a brief respite from the simmering tension. All the cards are still in
play, however, as Ben drunkenly confesses to Jong-su his ulterior motive for
the visit: he loves to set greenhouses on fire and hopes to find his next
victim in Jong-su’s vicinity.
A dark turn leads to the film’s third act and Lee calls upon
the audience to play detective. Jong-su propels himself into the role of
saviour, inquisitor, and, eventually hunter as he searches for Hae-mi. His
friend seems to have pulled off a vanishing act worthy of her cat boil,
although there are random shards of evidence—a phone call here, a suitcase
there—that suggest that flighty young Hae-mi didn’t run off on another trip. Everything
that comes before the third act is a clue in its puzzling mystery.
Lee baits the audience with red herrings and misdirection so
that there are many plausible scenarios to Burning’s
gnarled enigma. The smart casting of Ah-In and Yeun as the male rivals is one
of the film’s pleasures as the contrasting personalities, screen presence, and
acting styles of the men create a natural face-off between the Alpha and the
Beta. Burning builds to a showdown
between the men as Lee creates characters who are different on the surface, but
share traits too commonly associated with their sex. The film simmers with male
rage as Jong-su and Ben play a cat and mouse game with one another and Hae-mi’s
life presumably serves as the prize.
Most reviews and programming notes liken Burning to a thriller, but if one needs
to peg this enigmatic film, one could argue that it fits well within the
lineage of South Korean horror films. Many of the best Asian fright fests are
all about the slow burn as audiences follow wayward protagonists and villains
towards a brief violent climax. The same goes for Burning, which ensnares its audience in a tangled web of everyday
horror. It’s about the generations of male aggressors, noted in the
play-by-play of the trial of Jong-su’s father, who enact violence daily.
Seemingly mundane settings are perfect traps for predators. There are fields of
them with crops of unsuspecting victims to sow. When Lee finally provides the
shock of violence we’ve been anticipating, it’s unnervingly—and effectively—unsatisfying.
Burning opens in Toronto at the Lightbox on Nov. 2 and in
Vancouver at Vancity Theatre on Nov. 9.
