“Smugglers”: Korean crime retro
[ad_1]
Another South Korean hit is being released in Russia – “Smugglers” by Ryu Seung-wan. The cleverly composed and brilliantly acted plot tells about the South Korean province of the 1970s, but this movie is worth watching not out of ethnographic interest, but as a masterfully made genre production: “Smugglers” reminds that in the last twenty years only Koreans have been able to compete in this field with Hollywood.
South Korea, mid-1970s. In a coastal town where locals traditionally engaged in marine fishing, new times are coming. A newly built plant is poisoning the sea water along with its inhabitants, and a team of divers who extracted oysters from the seabed is forced to retrain: now, instead of oysters, they dive for boxes with smuggled cigarettes and gold bars. After one of the raids, the entire brigade ends up in prison, only Cho Chun Ja manages to escape. A few years later, she returns from Seoul with plans for an even larger-scale criminal operation.
Most Russian viewers of Smuggler’s Run will probably come to the cinema with little idea of what Korea was like 50 years ago. Immersion in the retro element seems to have brought the greatest pleasure to costume designer Yoon Jeong-hee, who dresses the heroines in colored checkered pantaloons and the heroes in shirts with wide collars. The characters, provincials in a semi-isolated country, are all the more greedy for bright things because fashionable clothes simply rarely reach their backwoods. They talk about what you can get in Seoul with a dreamy aspiration; Japan seems like a different planet altogether.
In general, however, director Ryu Seung-wan does not strive to turn his film into a purely nostalgic one – in the selection of the soundtrack, for example, there is no particular emphasis on retro sound. The choice of such an action time is determined by other tasks. Firstly, the 1970s are a completely different country, a poor, stagnant province that has not yet even begun to prepare for the future great breakthrough that will turn it into the center of world economic processes and into the most fashionable place in the world. Secondly – and this is even more important – the unusualness of Ryu Seung-wan’s film is that his gangster movie is not about a man’s world, but about a woman’s. It is for this kind of material that the director turns to the past – to the profession of haenyeo, that is, oyster divers. With the industrialization of Korea, this traditional craft, which reached its peak in the middle of the 20th century, practically disappeared – this is, in fact, the premise of the film, in which women decide to get involved with crime not out of a good life.
Thus, the film, which takes place half a century ago, in terms of gender dynamics, is completely in line with the spirit of the current times. And besides, it reminds us that not everywhere in the world there was one continuous patriarchy, as is commonly believed. In those areas of Korea where haenyeo worked, a different socio-economic situation developed: women were engaged in making money (it was experimentally found that women’s physiology is better than men’s for underwater gathering), and men raised children on the shore. Unfortunately, for viewers new to Korean history, the film does not talk about this phenomenon in detail, and therefore many details may seem like an artistic convention: for example, the ability of the heroines to hold their breath for several minutes in underwater scenes looks inhuman, but professional haenyeo trained for such work since childhood, they really knew how to do it.
It is also a pity that with a two-hour running time there is not enough time to delineate the characters of the heroines and the relationships between them a little more deeply. “Smugglers” is not an ensemble film like some “Ocean’s Friends” (or “Girlfriends”). Of the team of divers, we manage to remember about two, the others remain mostly in the background. As for the dynamics between the characters, the main chemistry here arises between a woman and a man – the enterprising Cho Chun Ja and her situational ally Sergeant Kwon, who carries out smuggling deliveries. He also cannot be called a very original villain: the main nerve of this character is the ratio of how good-looking he is and how cruel he is. We have seen such insinuating handsome sociopaths in movies more than once, but, however, the charisma of actor Jo In Sung is enough for his character to be, albeit stereotyped, but memorable. There is still no talk of psychologism or any special realism in the film; the acting here is based on very conventional gestures: “Smugglers” is one of those films where the characters wink conspiratorially at each other and carry on conversations while grabbing the interlocutor’s chest.
What did Ryu Seung-wan have time for? Throughout its two hours, the action of Smugglers is constantly accelerating. If the first act is played out quite linearly, then later – after Cho Chun Ja returns from Seoul – the heroes of Smugglers begin to play an increasingly complex game, setting up frames and conspiracies against their allies, and then conspiracies against those with whom they agreed earlier. From Western cinema, this is most reminiscent of the stories of Guy Ritchie – for example, in the second half of “Smugglers”, as is often the case with the British, Ryu Seung-wan has to rewind the action several times to reveal new details of the intrigue. Ritchie does it perhaps more effortlessly, but Wan (he wrote the script himself) manages to create a cleverly structured plot that is not difficult to follow.
After all, the world fell in love with Korean genre cinema not for its characters, but for its fights, and Smuggler’s Girl, towards the end, contains two mini-masterpieces of action choreography. The knife fight in the hallway—which occurs so unexpectedly that it looks like an insert attraction—recalls the classic hammer scene in Oldboy by Ryu’s teacher, Park Chan-wook; The climactic underwater scene doesn’t particularly resemble anything at all, because few people in the history of cinema decided to shoot climactic scenes underwater. And there, the director, who is not prone to rhetorical techniques, still finds one beautiful metaphor: in order to swim faster, divers hold hands and, pushing off, accelerate each other. Even in the cruel world of a crime thriller, where man is a wolf to man, there is a place for teamwork and mutual assistance.
In theaters from December 14
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
