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Burning
*****
Dir. Lee Chang-dong
Starring: Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, Jeun Jon-seo
(South Korea, 15, 2hrs 28mins)
Korean director Lee Chang-dong doesn’t make many films, but when he does they tend to be brilliant. Burning is no different. Coming eight years after his previous film, Poetry, this is a finely-tuned mystery drama. It permeates with a fine sense of the unknowable; it feels hard to grasp yet so easy to lose yourself in.
Adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story, the first half of Burning is fairly standard. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl goes away and comes back with a boyfriend. Jealousy ensues. But the girl (Jeon Jong-seo) disappears at the midway point. The boy (Yoo Ah-in) suspects the boyfriend (Steven Yeun). Slowly that suspicion turns into obsession, exacerbated by class differences – the boy, Jong-su, lives on a run-down farmhouse near the North Korea border, whilst the boyfriend, Ben, is a rich playboy-type living in the upmarket Gangam area of Seoul. The suspicions run in part because Ben admits to having a predilection for burning abandoned greenhouses, but also the fact that he treats the girl Hae-mi’s disappearance so casually.
What begins as an awkward relationship drama then develops into something much deeper and ruminative. Where the early half of the film is shot in even, often overcast daytime, much of the second half seems to take place in ‘magic hour’ at dusk, or on foggy, bleary mornings. The crucial conversation between Ben and Jong-su where Ben admits his pyrophilia is shot entirely with the two facing out towards the sunset one evening, the light fading from red to dark blue in front of us.
Afterwards, Jong-su’s obsessive jealousy for Hae-mi is displaced towards Ben and he begins to stalk him. In Jong-su’s mind all of the self-loathing he feels – his dislike of his father (in jail for assault and debt), his working-class background, his lack of success with the object of his affections – all is stored in his obsession with Ben, with Hae-mi hovering in the background. We never find out much about her, except that she wants to travel somewhere and find meaning in her life; she claims to be a former classmate of Jong-su, but he doesn’t immediately recognise or remember much about her (she claims to have had plastic surgery), and she tells a story about falling down a well in her childhood. When Jong-su plays detective later in the film to track her down, it transpires that no one can remember a well existing in the spot described, and neither can her mother remember such an incident either. Is this version of Hae-mi an imposter playing an elaborate trick on Jong-su? Probably not, but the question no doubt plays on his mind, encouraging his paranoia. Has he been played by these two?
For two-and-a-half hours, Burning is a near-flawless slow-boiler. Murakami and Lee Chang-dong, both lovers of narrative ambiguity are a match made in heaven (and for Murakami fans, there’s plenty of cats and sex here too). The performances are all superb. Steven Yeun, a US-based actor who has had a hell of a year, is charming but gives Ben an undercurrent of danger. Yoo Ah-in, a major South Korean actor, shoulders the burden of a very difficult, ambiguous part with ease. Jeun Jon-seo doesn’t get as much to do but her presence lingers over the film like a ghost. And then, of course, the direction – every moment, every detail builds towards a greater whole. A whole we never seem to be able to answer, but which we respond to with wonder, somehow. The first masterpiece of 2019.
words Fedor Tot