Review of Ryu Seung-wan’s film “Smugglers”

The film “Smugglers” (Milsu) by South Korean director Ryu Seung-wan is in theaters. Mikhail Trofimenkov I would compare it to the most sweeping Hollywood gangster films, if “Smuggler’s Girl” weren’t superior to any American example over the years by a couple of heads.

Theoretically, Smuggler’s Girl belongs to the type of crime genre represented, for example, by Martin Scorsese’s Casino. That is, this is the story of some original criminal enterprise. But in Hollywood, any such story is inevitably and certainly a story not only about the rise, but also about the collapse of this kind of enterprise. The hero-antihero is doomed to remain broke, and this is even in the best case. If he remains alive at all, he will have to console himself with the fact that his autobiography, written while serving a couple of life sentences, formed the basis of a successful film.

In South Korea, the attitude towards morality is somewhat, so to speak, volatile. Just remember the recent “Negotiation Game” by Lee Jong Suk. Monstrous, as it seems at first, the king of arms smuggling, Ming, turned out to be the bearer of the highest justice there as a result of the massacre. Koreans in general seem to have a reverent attitude towards smugglers. Here too, Sergeant Kwon (Cho In Sung), a smiling sadist with experience of “white terror” against the Vietnamese communists, will be the only male character in the film awarded the author’s grace to survive. Well, for the girls – there is no doubt about it from the very beginning – everything will be fine.

“Smugglers” is a unique example of a female gangster epic.

The time of action is the mid-1970s, the height of the brutal and thoroughly corrupt military-fascist dictatorship of General Park Chung-hee, who was subsequently killed by the head of his own state security. For Koreans, this is an obvious backdrop for the action. Just like the fact that in those days South Korea was an unhappy, impoverished country. If in the North, as is believed, they ate grass, then in the South they cooked soup for children from seafood waste collected with a shovel on a dirty pier.

The scene is the provincial port of Gonchon. South Korea is a small country, but the heroines talk about the capital Seoul as an unattainable planet that they will never reach in their lifetime. The ultimate dream is the port of Busan, which is where Kwon and his one-eyed adjutant are located. Also, to be honest, not Rio de Janeiro.

The heroines are representatives of the ancient profession of divers for oysters and other treasures of the seabed. They don’t use any equipment, they just know how to hold their breath for long minutes. One problem is industrialization: something chemical was built on the shore, and sea food is now inedible.

The girls have to retrain: to retrieve from the bottom of the sea boxes with contraband – cigarettes, televisions, and even gold – dropped on the high seas from Japanese or Hong Kong ships. This is where the main conflict emerges between friends Cho Chun Ja (Kim Hye Soo), who unscrupulously craves earthly goods, and Um Jin Sook (Yum Jung Ah), who is concerned about social justice.

Naturally, at some point the organs “rolled” into the open sea. Um’s father and brother died, she herself went to jail, and Cho, suspected of snitching, disappeared, only to return three years later with the notorious Kwon.

That’s where it all started.

A semi-social drama about the plight of divers turned into a gangster opera or musical. The episodes of catching small smugglers are hilarious: one has fifty watches ticking on his chest, another is wearing half a dozen jeans, the third, it’s scary to say where, is smuggling gold bars.

But the main thing that begins is in a magnificent rhythm, sometimes requiring flashbacks explaining, like Guy Ritchie, what the hell is going on on the screen – rock and roll of mutual setups, provocations and other squiggles with the participation of many players. Kwon gangs, gangs of the local boss Hammer, gangs of corrupt police officers and gangs of smugglers.

The Korean director would not be a true Korean if he had not crowned the film with two epic battles, the likes of which have not been seen on the world screen for a long time. Okay, the first of them, using exclusively bladed weapons, including nail pullers and axes, is played out in the hotel space. But another one was filmed exclusively – I don’t understand how it was filmed at all – under water. Not only on knives, but also on sharks – also a type of bladed weapon – which swim to the fighters with a wide smile in the genre of “what are you doing here?” to take part in the victory of good over evil.