Korean Cinema

My Korean language teacher just showed the class Shiri (sometimes called Swiri), a South Korean action movie from 1999. The film, although it was fairly typical Hollywood fare (a lot of explosions and gunfire from weapons that seemed to have an endless supply of bullets), showed that South Korean studios could really compete with American ones, at least when it came to senseless violence. But is that really such a good thing?

The plot (such as it was) revolves around Hee, a female North Korean-trained killing machine. As told in an early musical montage reminiscent of G.I. Jane, she is a master martial artist, has nerves of steel, and is a ruthlessly accurate sniper. She is not only a North Korean communist, and therefore evil according to this movie, she is working with "8th Special Forces," an even more diabolical terrorist branch of the army. After a particularly gruesome airline hijacking gone wrong, Hee disappears and is never heard from again.

Meanwhile, we meet Ryu and Lee, South Korean agents in O.P., the fictional intelligence agency. They have been working on bringing down the 8th Special Forces' plan, which involves a shipment of CTX. CTX is one of those substances that only exists in movies, a colorless, odorless, liquid that is harmless until its temperature rises above a certain point, when it becomes the most powerful explosive known to man. Oh, and it comes standard with a little plastic red ball that gets redder and redder as we near explosion. I wonder if that will become convenient when it comes time to build tension in the third act!

One of the agents, Ryu is in love with a mysterious young woman named Hyun who sells aquarium fish. Seeing as how she's the only other woman with speaking lines in the movie, his partner's bloody deathbed revelation that she's had plastic surgery and that Ryu is in love with his sworn enemy doesn't come as much of a surprise, although it's still fun to watch the actors chew the scenery (when they're not riddling it with bullets).

This movie was a bigger hit in South Korea than Titanic, and it certainly borrows a lot from the Hong Kong action style, but what I found most interesting was the constant talk of reunification of the Koreas. There is a running allegory involving "kissingurami", a breed of fish that mate for life and can't survive one without the other. Ostensibly, these fish represent the love between the two main characters, but one can't help but see them as a metaphor for Korea. And despite their brutal methods, the terrorists' over-riding goal (as chanted in drills and screamed before self-sacrifice) is "the reunification." Furthermore, when the villain gets his chance to speak at the end, his description of North Koreans starving as South Koreans become more and more Americanized, over-filling on Coke and cheeseburgers, is hard to disagree with.

Even more interesting is setting this bloodbath during a time when it seemed relations were warming up between the two nations. The climax takes place during a goodwill soccer match between them to decide which players to include on an all-Korea team for the next World Cup. Is the filmmaker rooting for unification or making a case for its impossibility? And if this movie is so Korean, why does it feel so American?

Ultimately, while South Korean audiences may have thrilled to this kind of big budget whizbang, what always fascinated me about Asian cinema is its ability to tell more than it is showing, and despite some political underpinnings, Shiri left me wanting less style and more substance.

m@x