随着《甜蜜人生》(A Bittersweet Life)和《亲切的金子》(Lady Vegeance)的成功,韩国电影在西方形势大好。但是这更多是指的数量而并非暴力和鱼钩,Grady Hendrix如是说。
可以说这开始于金基德《漂流欲室》(2000,The Isle)里那个绝望的逃亡者拿来填满自己喉咙的鱼钩,更为准确点说,是一把鱼钩。这部影片在欧洲捞得诸多奖项,在威尼斯它把前排观众弄的恶心连连,在纽约则产生另人昏晕的魔力效果。当艺术与运作冲撞,发行商听到收银机做响,而且在那孤独,奉承诱引的时刻,对韩国电影暴力的大量误解被灌入了西方观众的脑子里。
快进5年。尽管朴赞旭的《老男孩》(Old Boy)在戛纳电影节上获得戛纳大奖(Grand Prix),但是在迟来的美国发行前夕该片显然没有给美国评论界留下多少印象。Manohla Dargis在《纽约时报》的打眼处抨击之(“预示着一种破产的,减弱的后现代主义”),而Rex Reed在《纽约观察家》的页末亦打击之(“从一个吃着泡菜——一种把生大蒜和卷心菜混在一起埋在地下直到它们腐烂,然后从地里挖出来装在陶瓷罐里被当作纪念品在首尔飞机场售卖的东西——的国家那你还期待些什么?”)。朴赞旭2002年的阴冷代表作《我要复仇》(Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance)在美国上映了几个月之后,他成了公众人物。这部电影成了评论的众矢之的,甚至连最胆小的杂志作家们亦是如此为之,他们把过去在一个雨天攒集起来的辱骂都喊了出来。
好莱坞拿许多小行星去摧毁大行星,拿大屠杀作为娱乐,为无数的slasher films(肢解电影)弄出无数的结局,但是在韩国电影里,你很少能看到一把枪,然而韩国电影却被贴上了残忍和愤怒升级的标签。韩国电影票房排行榜上通常以喜剧片、浪漫片和情节片为主,但是西方发行商所购买的都是boundary-pushing类型片:2005年韩国电影最显著的国际形象就是朴赞旭复仇三步曲的终结篇《亲切的金子》,然而在韩国票房第一位的是《欢迎来到东莫村》(Welcome to Dongmakgol),一部关于韩国战争的愚蠢文化冲突的电影,第二名是《马拉松小子》(Marathon),一部关于患有孤独症的马拉松赛手的娱乐片。
变装暴徒
问题在于我们弄错了对暴力歌颂的讨论,我们步入了漫长的对话中间,而且在进入之前我们有两成的人对要说的毫无概念可言。韩国电影所表现出来的粗暴胜过了我们,但是朴赞旭和金基德近来的电影所表现的是韩国电影中阶级意识,反独裁推动力和长期存在的情节片口味三者之间唯一的最新的碰撞产物。
20世纪的韩国一直伤痕不断:日本殖民、二战、韩国战争、分割、军事统治、总统暗杀、对不合作主义者的暴力镇压……20世纪90年代国家进入稳定阶段,电影制作者从极端的审查制度中解脱出来,没有一个人说当局好话。掌权的人都会被人猜疑——警察腐败,政治家中庸——于是电影转而对准那些可以制造令人信服的英雄的公民阶层:罪犯。
1990年韩国电影界的元老林权泽拍摄了《将军的儿子》(Son of a General),一部讲述20世纪30年代贵族出身的黑帮老大抵抗日本侵略者的影片。这部影片得到的广泛好评引发出两个结果。在接下来的10年里大概像《两个警察》(Two Cops)、《无处藏身》(Nowhere to Hide)和《公敌》(Public Enemy)这样的警匪片让他们的警察英雄戴上了暴徒的面具,他们变成了打破法律束缚的独行者,他们在与权势做斗争上花费的时间跟到大街上执行公务的时间一样多。这些暴徒成了为之神魂颠倒的性渴望对象,而千禧年之后的观众也已经消灭完了一系列的喜剧片——《家族荣誉》(Married to the Mafia),《大佬斗和尚》(Hi! Dharma)、《头师父一体》(My Boss, My Hero)、《我的老婆是大佬》(My Wife is a Gangster)——这些使得那些出手够狠、直言不讳的暴徒更独具魅力。
历史片并不只是向政府提出疑问,他们更在电影中直指政府像《薄荷糖》(1999, Peppermint Candy),就是通过讲述一个警官的精神分裂影射现代的韩国历史,还有《那时候的人们》(2005, The President’s Last Bang),是一部对1979年南韩领导人朴将军暗杀事件的政治讽刺片。《实尾岛》(2004, Silmido),那时候韩国排名第二的大投资电影,讲述了1971年的实尾岛事件,一群被秘密训练潜入北韩地区刺杀总统金日成的犯人被迫退役,并且因为极端的偏见而必须被消灭掉。他们逃亡,然后被乱枪击倒在首尔的大街上,这一段是描写真正的英雄和软弱无能的政府走狗两者的高潮部分。
导演金相辰的喜剧团队和编剧兼导演的朴正佑汲取了黑帮片的精髓,并把它移花接木到轰动票房的一系列喜剧片上,譬如像《加油站被袭事件》(1999, Attack the Gas Station!),说的是受压制的人们通过暴力这样的极端均衡方式来达到追求上层生活的目的。但是在他们的2001年里要说能看什么,我会比较乐意去看浪漫喜剧片《新罗月色》(Kick the Moon),但是紧接下来这部影片就被浪漫喜剧升级版的《我的野蛮女友》(2001, My Sassy Girl)所打败。导演郭在容把有着古怪标准的女孩子描述成一个几近疯子的虐待狂,她对爱的唯一的表达方式就是羞辱折磨她所爱的对象。这个第一任性女朋友成为了韩国浪漫的一大特色,郭和《我的野蛮女友》的女主角扮演者全智贤在2004年再度合作电影《野蛮师姐》(Windstruck),其中全智贤扮演了一名终结者似的超级女警察,这部影片摇摆在平庸的喜剧到野蛮的暴力再到火烧火燎的情节剧之间。
至少从20世纪60年代以来相爱的情侣分离,饱含泪水的再见和情绪化的暴力相夹杂的情节片就已经成为韩国电影制作的首选类型,而且其技术运用似乎已经深入韩国导演的骨髓。尽管美国在制作暴力电影的数量上仍居第一,质量上却已经败给了韩国,韩国在这方面占据了王牌地位。从《下女》(1960, The Housemaid)到《再续父女情》(2004, A Family),暴力在韩国电影里既是近距离的也是个人化的。《太极旗飘扬》(2005, Tae-guk-gi),是韩国一直以来投资最高的一部电影,它甚至将韩国战争演化成一家两兄弟的家族斗争。其导演姜帝圭以1999年的《生死谍变》(Shiri)在韩国一鸣惊人,一对恋人举起枪指向对方的头这最后一幕是这部影片不可抹杀的一笔。
赎罪蛋糕
在朴赞旭和金基德的处理下,对政府的不信任,平衡各阶层的暴力运用和夸张本能的结合所为之的电影强奸了判断力。因为电影里出现的杀戮和他严肃对待那些品格低劣者,金基德在韩国遭遇一片骂声。而朴赞旭叙述北韩和南韩部队里一群被地理政治这台磨齿机碾成血肉模糊鱼饵的正规兵之间友谊的《JSA安全地带》(2001, Joint Security Area)获得巨大的成功给了他一张起动复仇三步曲的创意通行证,复仇三步曲——《我要复仇》、《老男孩》和《亲切的金子》——认为所有的政府都是腐败的。《我要复仇》让高尚的工厂工人对抗富有的工厂老板,《老男孩》则让一个可以任人使唤的中年工薪男人去对抗一个狡猾的事业有成者。但是《亲切的金子》的一个主要角色被双重诅咒:还有什么比一个出狱的囚犯和一个女人更下等的了?
但是《我要复仇》和《亲切的金子》的某些地方却让一些韩国导演厌恶起了暴力。张骏桓的《拯救绿色星球》(Save the Green Planet)可能是目前为止反暴力最强烈的电影;李明世执导的《捕快》(Duelist)用电影语言叙述了一个让肾上腺素吸毒者挠抓头皮的传奇故事;朴赞旭转向拍摄了他最富同情心的影片《永无止境的和平和爱》(Never Ending Peace and Love),这是一部为人权委员会的“如果你是我”电影合集拍摄的短片。甚至连金基德的疯狂人们在《空房间》(3-Iron)一片中也达到了一种超现实的友好关系,来了一次对非暴力抵抗的研究。
《亲切的金子》中的女英雄金子为自己的爱人顶下了杀害小男孩的罪名,在监狱里坐了13年牢。在她出狱时一群好管闲事的基督徒给了一碟象征着干净和救赎的蛋糕。这就是朴赞旭的电影,金子扔掉蛋糕,大步离开去招集她的狱中好友,实施一场错综复杂的复仇计划。
复仇是另一种形式的自恋,自我沉醉的金子在电影前半部分还远不能令人满意。最后她放弃了个人的行动,打算对其前恋人实施一场集体报复,但是这一事件最终以龌龊和自私而告终(在影片结束甚至有一场关于钱的讨论)。只在这个时候她意识到复仇从头到尾就是对灵魂摧残和对时间耗费,她把脸埋在一块巨大的蛋糕里,以求得宽恕。借用圣像画法的说法,《亲切的金子》标志着朴从临摹式的旧约方式向抓住救赎的新约个性方式的转变。
这个时期的类型
朴的这部影片直到演到一半的时候金子都不是招人喜欢的,这种令人不快的新方式被金知云得以发挥,他专门在人物结束时刻对他们进行破坏。他的新片《甜蜜人生》(A Bittersweet Life)是又一个讲述一个好员工和一个坏老板之间血腥冲突的故事。善宇(李秉宪饰演)是一个大酒店的打手。他老板出去度假的时候跟他说照看好他的女朋友,最后又像是补充一样地命令善宇如果发现她不忠就杀了她。不用说:她撒谎了。但是意想不到的是善宇同情她放她走了,金知云一定会惩罚他做的这件好事,一而再,再而三。
金知云就像是电影界的摇滚明星,一个沙发冲浪懒汉,他声称自己是偶然接触了电影,全因为它们“简单”。他的每部电影都像是讽刺地模仿和歌颂这段时期类型片的一场花哨舞台秀。《茅趸王》(2000, The Foul King)达到了反政府喜剧片热潮的顶点,它讲述了一个受压迫的银行文员在成为一个职业蒙面摔交手时发现自己人生支柱的故事。失败者获得胜利的情节却在最后这个小职员面对他那令人讨厌的老板并且……遭到了羞辱而破灭。《姐魅情深》(2003, A Tale of Two Sisters)是金对日本恐怖浪潮的变异,《甜蜜人生》则是他精心执导的复仇片,其中的善宇就是对老男孩里时髦着装、默默不语的暴力英雄的模仿。
善宇的老板不公正、记仇而且粗俗,因此这些也就暗示了善宇必定会要复仇。片中有很多对《的士司机》(Taxi Driver)的模仿,像善宇开着车到处转悠,夜晚的首尔被他甩在了车子后面,他透过车窗看见所有的一切完蛋。像Travis Bickle,他是一个被逼到抉择点上的男人,唯有去见一个奇怪军火商,然后有本事去到那个坏家伙的老巢才能结束所有的麻烦。最具讽刺性的是最后善宇与他们了断的场景,染满鲜血的浴缸里他的大部分敌人手里唯一的武器就是刀,这个他曾经置身其中的罪恶巢穴在电影开头曾是他的安乐之所。
在最后的画面中金知云只有亮出了刀,电影才能完全结束。跳回到开场时候的场景,我们看到善宇独自一人时对着自己的影子空拳练习,傻乎乎地就像一些人在洗澡时会唱歌一样。突然这个恐怖的执行者更像是一个傻傻的小男孩从模仿警探哈里里获得极大快感,而且好像整部电影就是他自己对男子气概的幻想。电影从《老男孩》到北野武的《奏鸣曲》(Sonatine)(《甜蜜的人生》有对其的模仿)再到《教父》(The Godfather)都被站在他们自我中心的完全认真地看待常常是荒唐的流血行动的男人们赋予一种严肃。在这类电影的核心让一个日常生活中的疯子去取代这些阴暗的角色不单单是指出这个国王没有穿衣服,而且还暗示这个第一的位置上从来就没有什么国王。
带着不多的几部电影,金知云加入到这波韩国导演的队伍中——他们寻找那些把时间花费在对上层阶级的艰难复仇作为故事结束词的沉默复仇执行者们的故事。但是他们的技术是无与伦比的,因此我们可以带着我们的复仇蛋糕,亦去批判之。
With the success of A Bittersweet Life and Lady Vengeance, Korean cinema is on a roll in the west. But there's more to its output than violence and fishhooks. By Grady Hendrix
You could say that it started with a fishhook. Or, more specifically, a handful of fishhooks crammed down the gullet of a desperate fugitive in Kim Ki-duk's The Isle (2000). Scooping up prizes across Europe, the movie prompted front-row vomiting fits in Venice and fainting spells in New York. Art collided with exploitation, distributors heard cash registers ringing and in that single, cringe-inducing moment a whole slew of misconceptions about Korean movies and violence were cemented in the minds of western audiences.
Fast-forward five years. Park Chan-wook's Old Boy won the Grand Prix at Cannes but on the eve of its belated US release it was clear that American critics weren't impressed. Manohla Dargis attacked from the high ground in the New York Times ("symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism") while Rex Reed struck from below in the New York Observer ("What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs?"). By the time Park's bleak 2002 masterpiece Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance opened in the US a few months later he was a marked man. The movie became a critical scratching post for even the most timid magazine writers, who fired off all the insults they'd been saving for a rainy day.
Hollywood destroys the planet with asteroids, recreates the Holocaust and makes multiple sequels to multiple slasher films and yet Korean movies, in which you rarely see a gun, are labelled brutal and bile-raising. The Korean box office is regularly dominated by comedies, romances and melodramas yet what western distributors buy are boundary-pushing genre films: in 2005 the Korean movie with the biggest international profile was the conclusion to Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy, Lady Vengeance, while in Korea the number-one title was Welcome to Dongmakgol, a goofy culture-clash flick about the Korean War, and at number two was Marathon, a feelgood film about an autistic marathon runner.
Gangster makeovers
The problem is that we've mistaken a discussion about violence for its glorification; we've stepped into the middle of a long-running conversation and thrown in our two cents with no idea of what was said before we entered the room. Korean movies do play rougher than we're used to, but what Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk's recent films represent is only the latest collision between Korean cinema's class-consciousness, anti-authoritarian impulses and a long-standing taste for melodrama.
Korea's 20th century has been one trauma after another: colonisation by Japan, World War II, the Korean War, partition, military rule, presidential assassination, the violent suppression of civil disobedience... By the time the country stabilised in the 1990s and film-makers were freed from excessive censorship no one had anything nice to say about authority. Anyone with power was viewed with suspicion - cops were corrupt, politicians compromised - and so cinema turned to the one class of citizens who could make believable heroes: criminals.
In 1990 Im Kwon-taek, Korea's grand old man of film, made Son of a General, about a noble gang leader putting the smack down on Japanese occupiers in the 1930s. Its popularity spawned two sequels. Over the next decade or so cop films like Two Cops, Nowhere to Hide and Public Enemy gave their police heroes gangster makeovers, turning them into law-breaking mavericks who spent as much time fighting the power as they did policing the streets. Gangsters became the objects of swoony sexual longing and post-millennium audiences ate up a series of comedies - Married to the Mafia, Hi! Dharma, My Boss, My Hero, My Wife Is a Gangster - that glamorised hard-hitting, straight-talking thugs.
Historical films didn't just question authority, they crucified it in movies like Peppermint Candy (1999), which mirrors modern Korean history in the mental disintegration of a police officer, and The President's Last Bang (2005), a political satire on the 1979 assassination of South Korean leader General Park. Silmido (2004), the second-highest grossing movie ever released in Korea, detailed the 1971 Silmido Incident where a gang of criminals, secretly trained to infiltrate North Korea and assassinate President Kim Il-Sung, were decommissioned and scheduled to be exterminated with extreme prejudice. They escaped and were taken down in a wild shoot-out on the streets of Seoul, depicted as high noon between true heroes and spineless government lackeys.
The comedy team of director Kim Sang-jin and screenwriter/director Park Jung-woo took the spirit of the gangster films and grafted it to a string of blockbuster comedies like Attack the Gas Station! (1999), about downtrodden everymen going after the upper classes via the great equaliser of violence. But their 2001 'anything you can punch I can punch better' romantic comedy Kick the Moon was trounced by the next step in the rom-com evolution: My Sassy Girl (2001). Director Kwak Jae-yong tweaked the genre's standard-issue quirky chick into a near-psychotic sadist whose sole expression of love is to humiliate and torture the object of her affections. The fist-swinging girlfriend became a staple of Korean romance and Kwak and My Sassy Girl star Jun Ji-hyun reunited in 2004 for Windstruck, in which she plays a Terminatrix super-cop in a film that swings from predictable comedy to brutal violence to eye-burning melodrama.
Melodrama, with its lovers torn apart, tearful goodbyes and emotional violence, is the genre that has dominated Korean film-making since at least the 1960s, and its techniques seem to be woven into the DNA of Korean directors. While America is still number one in terms of the quantity of its motion-picture violence, Korean films have trumped it in the quality department. From The Housemaid (1960) to A Family (2004), the violence in Korean movies is up-close and personal. Tae-guk-gi (2005), the top-grossing Korean movie of all time, even turns the Korean War into a family feud between two brothers. Its director Kang Je-gyu gave Korea its first major blockbuster back in 1999 with Shiri, whose indelible final image has two lovers holding guns to each other's heads.
Facedown in the tofu
In the hands of Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk the distrust of authority, the use of violence as the great leveller between classes and the melodramatic instinct combine to make for cinema that assaults sensibilities. Kim Ki-duk is reviled in Korea for the carnage in his films and for taking his gallery of low-class characters so seriously. In the case of Park Chan-wook, the huge success of JSA (Joint Security Area) (2001), about a friendship between regular joes in the North and South Korean armies who get pulped into bloody chum by the grinding gears of geopolitics, gave him a creative licence that he used to embark on his vengeance trilogy - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy and Lady Vengeance - which takes for granted that all authority is corrupt. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance pits its noble factory worker against a rich industrialist and Old Boy sets a disposable, middle-aged salaryman against a slick go-getter. But Lady Vengeance has a main character who's doubly cursed: what could be lower than an ex-con and a woman?
Yet somewhere between Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance some Korean directors developed a distaste for violence. Jang Joon-hwan made Save the Green Planet, possibly the most violent anti-violence movie ever; Lee Myung-se shot Duelist, a romance told in action-movie language that left adrenaline junkies scratching their heads; Park Chan-wook turned in his most compassionate film Never Ending Peace and Love, a short for the Human Rights Commission's omnibus flick If You Were Me. Even Kim Ki-duk's rage-heads reached a surreal detente in 3-Iron, a study in non-violent resistance.
Lady Vengeance's heroine Keum-ja takes the rap for her lover's murder of a little boy and is packed off to prison for 13 years. On her release she's greeted by a gaggle of Christian busybodies who offer her the traditional plate of white tofu, symbolising cleansing and redemption. This being a Park Chan-wook movie, Keum-ja tosses the tofu and strides off to round up her prison buddies and engineer a complicated revenge scheme.
Revenge is another form of narcissism, and self-absorbed Keum-ja isn't even remotely palatable for the first half of the movie. Finally giving up her personal mission, she tries to orchestrate communal retribution against her ex-lover but the event winds up feeling petty and small-minded (there's even an argument over the bill at the end). It's only when she realises that all revenge is a soul-destroying time-waster that she goes facedown in the biggest piece of tofu she can find, begging for forgiveness. Loaded with Christian iconography, Lady Vengeance marks the transformation of Park from an eye-for-an-eye Old Testament director to a New Testament auteur grappling with redemption.
Genre of the moment
Park's off-putting conceit of making Keum-ja as unlikeable as possible until half way through the film could have been lifted from Kim Jee-woon, who specialises in torpedoing his characters in their closing moments. His latest film A Bittersweet Life is yet another tale of bloody conflict between a good employee and a bad boss. Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) is a tightly wound enforcer in a vast hotel who takes care of the jerks who hog the karaoke rooms. When his boss goes on vacation he asks Sun-woo to look after his young girlfriend and, almost as an afterthought, orders Sun-woo to kill her if he finds she's being unfaithful. Sure enough: she's cheating. But in an uncharacteristic moment of compassion Sun-woo lets her go and Kim Jee-woon makes sure he's punished for his good deed again, and again, and again.
Kim Jee-woon is the director as rock star, a couch-surfing slacker who claims he stumbled into the movies because they were "easy". Each of his films is like a flashy stage show that sends up and celebrates the genre of the moment. The Foul King (2000) came at the height of the anti-authority comedy boom, telling the story of a downtrodden bank clerk who finds his spine when he becomes a masked professional wrestler. The triumph-of-the-underdog plot implodes at the end when the clerk finally confronts his nasty boss and... gets humiliated. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) was Kim's mutated take on the J-horror wave and A Bittersweet Life is his more subtle take on the revenge movie, with Sun-woo practically a parody of Old Boy's sharply dressed, pre-verbal, havoc-wreaking hero.
Sun-woo's boss is unfair, unforgiving and tacky, so the requirements of the genre dictate that Sun-woo must take revenge. There are echoes of Taxi Driver as Sun-woo drives around night-time Seoul trapped behind the wheel of his car, watching everything go to hell through the windshield. Like Travis Bickle, he's a man pushed to breaking point, and only a visit to a quirky arms dealer and a final, high-calibre stroll through the bad guy's headquarters can bring matters to a close. It's a nice irony that Sun-Woo's final showdown is a bloodbath with most of his opponents armed only with knives, and the evil citadel he penetrates was his own cosy hangout at the start of the film.
The movie isn't much more than an especially accomplished knock-off until Kim Jee-woon twists the knife in the final frames. Jumping back in time to the opening scene, we see Sun-woo self-consciously shadow-boxing his reflection in a private moment of silliness, like someone singing in the shower. Suddenly this grim enforcer looks more like a goofy little boy getting his kicks from acting like Dirty Harry, and it seems the entire movie could be his own macho power fantasy. Films from Old Boy to Kitano Takeshi's Sonatine (echoed in Bittersweet) to The Godfather are all given gravitas by the men at their centre who regard the often ridiculously bloody proceedings with complete earnestness. To replace the dark character at the heart of such movies with an everyday goofball is not only to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes, but to suggest that there was never any emperor in the first place.
With this handful of shots Kim Jee-woon has joined a wave of Korean directors who are finding tales of tight-lipped enforcers who spend their days exacting vengeance on the upper classes to be a narrative cul de sac. But their technique is unbeatable and so we get to have our revenge cake, and critique it too.