Kimchi of the last strength – Weekend
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Pak Tae-min’s “Baby Driver” is released in Russian cinemas – an action movie about a taxi for those who no longer want to live in the Republic of Korea, and there is no time for a legal departure. The lead role is played by Park So Dam, who played the daughter of a negligent Kim family in the Oscar-winning “Parasite” by Bong Chun Ho. The film came to Russia from the festival in Rotterdam.
Chef-chan (Park So Dam) works in a “special delivery”: helping people of a difficult fate, hiding from the law and / or bandits, get to the port of Busan and give a tear from South Korea. She herself is a refugee from the DPRK, but she does not feel any empathy for clients: she just needs to earn a living somehow. And Chef-chan drives – bless you: Daniel from “Taxi” (1998), the Driver from “Drive” (2011) and even a gang of daredevils from the endless “Fast and the Furious” in comparison with her are city slickers on pumped cars.
Actually, the recipe for the success of South Korean cinema in Western countries, which has occupied the minds of festival selectors, streaming marketers and ordinary viewers for 20 years, is of the same quality as the skill of the heroine of “Baby Driver”. Something that you have already seen many times, but at such speeds and in such genre proportions that no Luc Besson can afford at home. Even Edgar Wright’s “Baby Driver”, which gave such a sonorous localization to the uncomplicated original title “Teuksong”, seems – scary to say – not so dynamic. However, the highest racing and editing pilotage is a prelude to a melodrama, where director Park Tae-min (“Murder in the Shadow”, “How to Steal a River”) will not be shy of any tricks. No massacre, no fuss, no belching, no children’s tears, no hairpins against law enforcement agencies – sometimes the same gangsters, but at the expense of the state.
Chef-chan’s new order is to transport match-fixing baseball player Do Sik (Yong Woo Jin) from Seoul to Beijing. The athlete decided not to wait for the weather by the sea, planning to escape from the country with his young son Seo Won (Jung Hyun Joon). In the end, everything goes awry: police officer Jo Kyung-Pil (Song Sae-byuk), who covers the illegal business, finds the fugitive a moment before the taxi arrives, but the boy manages to escape, having received from his dad a backpack with 20 million won, plus a remote control from the safe, where there are 30 more billion. And now the unprincipled racer, accustomed to any lawlessness, gets involved in a real adventure: to help a defenseless child escape from almighty pursuers.
An inquisitive viewer will probably think: “I’ve seen this somewhere before,” but this is how the South Korean secret to bringing tricks to a shine is revealed. “Baby Driver” is reminiscent of Luc Besson’s movies at their peak: Seo Won even quotes Matilda from “Leon” asking the reclusive hitman if life always sucks, or just when he’s young. For a young soul, what is happening is doubly surprising: just now he was playing “Words” with a smart watch, proving that the “achievement” should be counted, and here is the criminal news, dad is beaten with a bat, and the police do not protect and even vice versa. Chef-chan decides not to leave Seo Won to fend for himself, but being human is expensive. And it’s not about the safe with 30 billion, which policeman Jo Kyung Pil considers “severance pay” for himself and his equally unprincipled colleagues. Nothing personal, just business.
It is in the combination of such “extremes” that Korean cinema, one must think, has succeeded. Unlike the Romanian new wave – another phenomenon of the beginning of the 21st century – this is an industrial history, not a piece, but its best examples do not leave a feeling of in-line production. Since the success of the action movie Shiri in 1999, national cinema has steadily moved to the top – and festival stars like the apostles of “Asian extreme” Bong Chun Ho, Kim Ji Wong or Park Chang Wook are also well watched.. “The Decision to Leave” – in the top ten box office records last year, “Parasite” – in the top 50 of all time. Whatever one may say, in any country of the world people are more willing to pay for a spectacle, and only then for important topics and acute questions of reality. “Baby Driver”, where corruption, bureaucracy and even glare of intolerance flicker on the sidelines, first of all, a dashing movie that unobtrusively and safely transports viewers through the evil streets, as Scorsese and New Hollywood bequeathed. And even in the scenery of the orphanage, it suits a happy ending: in reality, of course, it can be gloomier and creepier, but still, according to Hitchcock, “cinema is life from which everything boring is cut out.” And added some hope.
In theaters from July 20
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