The luxury of human revenge – Newspaper Kommersant No. 228 (7429) of 12/08/2022

Lee Il Hyun’s film “Remember” is released. The director packaged uncomfortable questions of historical memory and collective responsibility in the form of a dashing action movie, filmed in the traditional South Korean cinema genre of a “revenge movie”, but with an unusual hero. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

Revenge, and the varied but almost always brutal ways in which it is carried out, is a favorite motif in Korean cinema. As a reference embodiment of this theme, in the first place, of course, Park Chan-wook’s Revenge Trilogy comes to mind: “Sympathy for Mr. Revenge” (2002), “Oldboy” (2003) and “Sympathy for Mrs. Revenge” (2005). Young director Lee Il Hyun (“Remember” is only his second feature film) also makes his vigilant hero worthy of sympathy, rooting his motives not only in a personal but also a national tragedy and putting the viewer in a rather uncomfortable moral dilemma.

“Remember” is a free remake of the film of the same name by Atom Egoyan (2015), in which an 80-year-old former prisoner of Auschwitz, suffering from dementia, went in search of an SS officer, whom he considered the main culprit in the death of his family, in order to take revenge on him. Lee Il-hyun transfers history to his native soil, and everything immediately becomes, according to the popular expression, not so simple: the objects of retribution, which should overtake them more than seventy years after the crimes committed, are Korean collaborators who collaborated with the Japanese during the occupation in 1940- x years. And all these years they were not hiding from justice at all, but, on the contrary, they made brilliant careers in the army, business and politics, conveniently “forgetting” about their past and urging their fellow citizens to do the same. What, they say, is the point of combing old grievances again and again, when at the present stage Japan can become a reliable and profitable partner for South Korea?

This point of view is not at all shared by Han Pil-chhu (Lee Sung-min), who remembers the 1940s much better than what happened last week – also because he has Alzheimer’s in a fairly advanced stage and short-term memory begins to refuse. At the beginning of the picture, this peaceful God’s dandelion is finalizing the last days before retirement as a waiter at TGI Friday`s. Young colleagues who nicknamed the old man Freddie love him dearly, especially Ingyu named Jason (the star of the dramas is handsome Nam Joo Hyuk). The first hint that Grandpa Freddie is not as simple as he seems comes when he stands up for Jason in front of a rude client, showing unexpected sharpness of mind and sleight of hand.

Having gone on a well-deserved rest, Han Pil-chhu is not going to quietly bask in the sun and grow flowers while waiting for Alzheimer’s to subdue him completely. First of all, he visits a barn in his own yard, where a bag full of money is found, a diagram with portraits of suspects hanging on the wall, like every self-respecting investigator in the movies, and under the floor is a hidden Colt from the time of the Japanese occupation. He then records a video in which he explains that he intends to crack down on five people responsible for what happened to his family: the father was arrested by the Japanese on a denunciation and tortured to death, his mother died of grief, his brother died in a labor camp, and his sister was forced become a “comfort woman”, and she committed suicide. Unlike Egoyan’s film, Han Pil Chu doesn’t have to identify his enemies. They are well known to him, and in order not to forget, he tattoos their names on his own fingers.

Another important difference: in the 2015 film, the avenger was played by 86-year-old Christopher Plummer at the time, and he was assisted by a wheelchair-bound character played by his peer Martin Landau, while Korean actor Lee Sung Min was only 54 years old. Of course, he was transformed with the help of plastic make-up, in some scenes more convincing than in others, but his hero still runs very cheerfully, fights, jumps up stairs and drives a car, and not just any, but a chic bright red Porsche. “. Young Ingyu becomes his partner, attracted first by the opportunity to drive this car, then by the promise of money after the successful completion of the mission (at the same time, Han Pil Chhu manages to deal with the creditors threatening the guy, each of which is three times younger than him and physically four times larger). And only then, when the dead bodies begin to crumble, like dominoes, bogged down in this mission so that it is no longer possible to jump off. And if Plummer’s hero hobbled calmly around the American provinces in search of his goal, then in the Korean version, not only the police, but also the mercenaries of one of the villains rush in pursuit of the heroes.

As a result, philosophical and ethical issues in the film often fade into the background, giving way to an action game that is cheerful in Korean and defies all the laws of logic, physics and evidence-based medicine in Korean. The police unsuccessfully chase after an old man and a youngster driving the most noticeable car within a radius of one hundred kilometers, Ingyu receives an express lesson in the history of the fatherland, and the audience has the opportunity to think about the consequences of a national trauma, sometimes taking on such bizarre forms.