Enemy States – Weekend

In Russia – “The Hunt”: a South Korean political thriller about the confrontation with the DPRK in the 1980s, shown in the Spanish Sitges – the main horror show in Europe and in the out-of-competition program of the Cannes Film Festival. We figure out how the directorial debut of the main artist from The Squid Game turned out, as well as who is to blame (and what to do).

Text: Alexey Filippov

1983 The South Korean leader (not named Chun Doo-hwan) visits Washington. The visit is accompanied by mass demonstrations by emigrants, as well as an assassination attempt on the president by a North Korean sniper. Next, the South Korean operation in Tokyo breaks down, during which a potential defector reports the presence of a “mole” in the ranks of the special services. The search for North Korean spies is intensifying both in foreign and domestic intelligence. Park Byung Ho (Lee Jong Jae from The Squid Game) is responsible for the first direction, Kim Jong Do (Jung Woo Sung from The Good, the Bad, the Fucked Up) is responsible for the second direction. Employees of both departments are intensively digging under colleagues – and dubious contacts are eventually found everywhere.

The plot of the zealous spy action movie The Hunt pulses in a triangle of historical events: the brutal suppression of a rally in Gwangju, which practically began the reign of Chun Doo Hwan in 1980, the escape of a DPRK Air Force pilot who flew in a MIG-19 directly to Seoul, and – a micro-spoiler – Rangoon terrorist attack in Burma, again associated with the South Korean president. Pak and Kim go through this difficult hour for their homeland in different ways, demonstrating either intelligence ruthlessness, or civic sympathy, or even oppressed patriotism: the growing welfare of officials and the atrocities of the regime do not seem to bode well for the country. In addition, northern defectors are reminiscent of the fact that it is impossible to live like this, rejoicing in ramen and the fact that spoiled food, it turns out, can be returned or exchanged.

However, the main collision with the search for a spy under the pseudonym Donlim resembles not so much political thrillers as hard-boiled crime sagas – like “Fight” (1995) by Michael Mann or “Infernal Affairs” (2002) by Andrew Lau and Alan Mack, which under the name “The Departed ” in 2006 was reshot by Martin Scorsese. The confrontation between Pak and Kim, who find themselves on opposite sides of the barricades in every sense, is a duel not just of pros with a certain code of honor, but of people looking for a better future for the country and the world. And the intricacies of the plot here are to match the political situation, in which the interests of the invaders from the DPRK and South Korean revolutionaries, who have despaired of believing in the potential for peaceful protest, suddenly intersect.

Of course, the history of the May 1980 events in Gwangju plays an important role in understanding the “Hunt”, which, under Chun Doo-hwan, qualified as a pro-communist uprising, and after his departure became a symbol of the struggle for democracy. The devastating consequences, primarily for the psyche of the nation, of the military suppression of civil will were actively reflected in South Korean cinema. For example, in 1999, Lee Chang Dong, who would later become Minister of Culture for a year and also hit the Cannes Film Festival with “Burning,” directed Peppermint, an odyssey about the trauma of a draftee who found himself in the middle of nowhere. Or Jung Yun-chul in the mockumentary-dragicomedy The Man Who Was Superman (2008) cleverly connects the events of Gwangju and the Korean premiere of the blockbuster with Christopher Reeve: the mighty alien will become a symbol of popular frustration and childhood trauma, which, it seems, can only be compensated by a superman with S on the chest.

It is all the more interesting that this line is continued by debutant director Lee Jong Jae – the star of not only the Netflix hit “The Squid Game”, but also “The Maids” (2010) by Lim Sang-soo – a rethinking of the classic 1960 film that had a powerful influence on all national cinema . Half a century later, terrible class stratification, war scars and internal contradictions no longer allow you to rest in a K-pop utopia. And even more so to forget at what cost great changes were given.

At the box office May 18

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