SIGNALS: JANG JIN
SIGNALS: JANG JIN
Welcome to Dongmakgol
Murder, Take One
with words. He can write repartee to match the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s, but what he likes most is playing with words: exploring verbal ambiguities, savouring non-sequiturs, showing characters extending their vocabularies. And he does love a good slanging match. His first filmed script, a 1995 adaptation of Song Chaehwan’s A Hot Roof (directed by Lee Minyong), offered a tremendous range of insults: women protestors shouting at police, vigorous disagreements about protest tactics, trapped burglars bickering with each other, women holding their own against abusive men. Plenty of the movies Jang went on to direct himself also feature memorable arguments. He also knows when it’s better that his characters shut up, but his dialogue is certainly the equal of the humorous banter in Hong Sang-soo movies. Like other key figures in the Korean film renaissance of the 1990s, Jang founded his own production company soon after he began directing. He called it ‘Film It Suda’ – ‘Suda’ means ‘non-stop chatter’. The movie that made him famous has ‘suda’ in its title: it’s Killer-deului suda (2000), which literally means ‘Killers’ Non-stop Chatter’. In English, he called it Guns and Talks. As I said, endearing.
parole lives 15 years in 24 hours, a conundrum almost worthy of Borges. In We Are Brothers, a Catholic priest clashes with a shaman (yes, they’re brothers) as they search for their mother, a missing woman with Alzheimer’s – until the real roots of their sibling rivalries are laid bare. And in the ensemble pieces – Murder, Take One and The Quiz Show Scandal, not to mention the adaptation of his play Welcome to Dongmakgol – Jang takes pleasure not only in orchestrating disparate strands of narrative but also in forcing the characters to deal with unfamiliar and unexpected situations. Jang is all about moving outside what they call ‘comfort zones’.
Genre and Wit Jang works with many of Korea’s best actors (he trained quite a few of them on stage productions), but stretches them in ways that most other Korean directors don’t. First, he gives them characters with defined personal histories, always rooted in social realities; they’re not just ‘types’. Second, his way of twisting genres challenges actors to find the humour in personal tragedy or the pathos in bravado, or the weakness in violence. He generally gets from them the very best they can give, even when they’re playing hopeless losers or people trapped in false images of themselves. Few of Jang’s movies are simply genre films. In Guns and Talks, the supposedly hard hitmen are philosophical and lovelorn; they’re also obsessed by a woman presenter on TV. In My Son, the life-term prisoner who gets a one-day
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44TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM
Flesh and Fantasy The Signals slot in IFFR is often reserved for committedly marginal filmmakers; those who challenge the mainstream of their cultures from a position on the margins. Jang Jin is the precise opposite, an independent voice who invades the heartland of the mainstream. Kind of like the writer William Burroughs, who wore suits and generally came on like a respectable gent to camouflage his habit of saying the unsayable. Consider Jang’s recent film Man on High Heels. It starts out with reassuring familiarity, using every well-known trope of Korean police thrillers and gangster movies, including the hyperbolic violence and its associated action choreography, and maintains them with considerable expertise almost throughout. But the macho protagonist wants to transition his gender, and his psychological ‘trouble’ gradually undermines all the genre conventions. This pushes the film to a complex and worldly-wise ending that leaves genre far behind. Man on High Heels encapsulates all of Jang Jin’s strengths. He knows the flesh, and all that it is heir to: the hunger, the pain, the craving, the compulsions. And he also knows the fantasies that the body hosts: the desires, the delusions, the comforting illusions. He sets all this out with enormous wit, style and energy. Trust me, by the time you get to know him you’ll wish you’d found him earlier.
44TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM
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