Burning, Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is based loosely on a 1992 short story by Haruki Murakami called “Barn Burning.” It takes that very brief framework and builds a dreamlike, post-noir feature film, running nearly two and a half hours, that entraps viewers in its layered mysteries early and then increases the tension like a vice as it approaches its shocking resolution. (The Murakami story appears in The Elephant Vanishes, and is also in the online archives of the New Yorker.)
Lee Jong-su* is an unemployed, would-be writer who bumps into an old classmate, Shin Hae-mi, whom he doesn’t recognize because she’s had plastic surgery. She spots him, and makes it clear that she has some interest in him, eventually bringing him back to her tiny apartment and sleeping with him. She also asks him to feed and clean up after her cat while she takes a two-week trip to Africa, which he agrees to do even though it’s a long drive from his father’s farm in the country. When Jong-su goes to pick Hae-mi up on her return, she’s with a new guy, Ben, who is rich, condescending, and possibly her boyfriend. Jong-su seems resigned to the loss of Hae-mi to Ben, but those two keep inviting him out with them, stringing him along, until one day Ben confesses to Jong-su that he has a hobby of burning greenhouses, burning one every two months or so because it’s the ‘right pace’ for him. Later that night, Jong-su makes a cutting remark to Hae-mi, after which she vanishes, leaving Jong-su to try to figure out what’s going on. From there, the story turns darker as Jong-su follows – or stalks – Ben in search of the girl.
* Korean names are written with the family name first; I’ve held to that convention in this review.
At one point in the film, Ben says to Hae-mi, “it’s a metaphor,” after which she asks what a metaphor is, and Ben says Jong-su should answer, since he’s a writer. This entire film is a metaphor wrapped around a set of smaller metaphors. There’s a strong subtext of the pervasive nature of class distinctions in Korean society, and how the upper class may view the lower classes as not just inferior but expendable. Ben represents the idle, entitled rich, while Jong-su and Hae-mi both come from the lower classes. Jong-su lives on a farm while his father is in jail for assaulting a government official, and has very little spare cash; his estranged mother reappears at one point, complaining of how rich Koreans treat her in her menial job and saying how she needs money, which Jong-su promises to provide despite lacking means. Hae-mi, we learn, is broke, with outstanding debts she can’t pay, working just occasionally as a model/dancer outside shops that hire girls like her to try to drum up business. Ben drives a Porsche, lives in a gorgeous apartment, thinks nothing of spending money on food or drink, and appears to have little regard for people he views as beneath him, as do the friends of his who appear in the film – totally ignoring Jong-su while he’s at their parties while treating Hae-mi and Ben’s next girlfriend as if they’re some sort of entertainment, not actual people.
Throughout the film are smaller metaphors, not least of them the actual burning and references to it. There are cigarettes everywhere (and the occasional joint), fires in the background of shots, the burning color of the sun at sunset, and hints of the world burning around our characters with Donald Trump appearing on a TV lying about immigration and with North Korean propaganda audible outside Jong-su’s house. Birds make several appearances; there’s a postcard drawing of a bird in Hae-mi’s apartment, but it’s gone after she vanishes. Hae-mi tells a story about a well that might also have been a metaphor, but discussing its implications would reveal too much.
The main criticism of Murakami’s writing has long been that he doesn’t write compelling women, and the woman in “Barn Burning” is nothing but a prop, so the screenwriters here had a blank canvas … and didn’t do a ton with it. Hae-mi, played by Jeon Jong-seo in her first film role (where she really reminds me of Lily James), is a Boolean character – she has two modes, the flirtatious and perhaps overly sexual coquette as well as the stark depressive who seems to lack a will to live. All her edges are extremely sharp, while Jong-su in particular is drawn with far more nuance to just about every aspect of his character. Jeon does what she can with a character that verges on the ridiculous, at times appearing more like the object of male fantasy than like a fully realized woman, but the writing limits what she can do.
The two male leads deliver outstanding performances. Yoo Ah-in plays Jong-su as a sort of slack-jawed stoner – seriously, his mouth is constantly open – whose expressions and slow reactions would imply that he’s not very bright, but there’s more intelligence beneath the surface here, and Yoo gives him some emotional depth that I wasn’t expecting given how the film first introduces the character. Stephen Yeun is totally magnetic as Ben, smarmy and confident and charismatic, the character Jong-su wants to dislike but can’t quite come around to doing so because Yeun gives him that extra layer of amiability on top of what appears to be a rather unpleasant core.
The original story has Jong-su’s character comparing Ben’s to Jay Gatsby, a line that also appears in the film, while William Faulkner comes up twice during the movie as well. (I had a book with me to read while I waited for the film to start, and in a pure coincidence, it was Faulkner’s The Unvanquished.) The Faulkner connection is fascinating as his writing was frequently opaque, full of symbol and metaphor, and covered themes like racial prejudice and the moral decay that can accompany rising financial status. Ben’s skin is substantially lighter than those of the other main characters, as are his friends’, and the question of his morality and motivations, and even how he acquired such wealth, hangs over the last half of the film.
Murakami’s story doesn’t make the ending clear, but the film makes it much more evident what’s happening with these characters – at least, I think it does, although director Lee Chang-dong ensures that we never get explicit proof that our suspicions are correct. There’s sufficient misdirection here to keep viewers thinking about this film for days afterwards, as I have been. It’s well-written, extremely well-acted, features some stunning and memorable shots, and is just tortuous enough to keep you off balance right through the final scene. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.