From the archives - Barrie Pattison retrieves Kim Ji-hoon's Gwangju massacre drama MAY 18 (South Korea, 2007)

With A Taxi Driver running in the multiplexes, I dug out my coverage of Hwaryeohan hyuga/May 18 which also covered the Gwangju Massacre and and showed here to Koreans ten years back. I was sufficiently impressed then to want to put it into the Chauvel Cinematheque but that didn't happen. Notice the protagonist in the earlier film is also a cab driver and incidents occur in both films.

While the attempted South Korean Military Coup of 1980 doesn’t register outside, the nationals with whom I watched watched this film were reduced to tears.Some simple-minded framing stories kick things off. It focuses on some cab drivers, one of whom is looking after his student brother and hankers after a winsome nurse, while one gets into a punch up with-the drunk who brings doggie do into his vehicle. The cheery Catholic priest organising picnic games, is prominent.However the street action, confrontation between troops and the mob is as imposing as anything in Nicolaichirke, Potemkin or Medium Cool. Soldiers baton charge students,  Ranks open to show the armed troops behind. One of the brother’s class mates is killed.

Student demo, May 18

In the set piece, believing that the soldiers will withdraw at noon, as arranged, the
Gwangju agitators jeer at the military, till the National Anthem plays with both groups paying respect, only to have the army open fire. Shock on shock - a girl is wounded in the legs and starts to drag herself only to be shot dead on the road, the hero’s brother is cut down in front of him. A doctor, outraged that all the people brought in are already dead, decides to take an ambulance to the scene and only the nurse will help him. He too is gunned down for helping wounded demonstrators.

The impetus carries for a while, with the hero, among those stripped and piled into trucks, taking out the guard and jumping off the river bridge with bullets smashing round him as he runs and shelters in the yard of the blind woman, waiting for her son. A soldier, swinging his baton, takes off after the nurse and, in the fight with our hero, pulls a vicious looking knife, only to be shot from behind by her. Lee, the mature ex-officer outraged, organises the raid on the arms dump and there’s the stirring cut to him operating the medium-sized machine gun against the trucks. They have had it all their own way to that point.

The teacher who stood in front of the gates forbidding the students to join in now spreads cream to protect their eyes. The lead sends the military a case of TNT to warn that they will detonate Gwangju City Hall if they attack. 

Things spiral down, with the nurse proving to be the ex-soldier’s daughter and much deciding who will die defending the City Hall, knowing that the military will strike before the Americans roll in to stabilise things. There are still telling scenes, like the wives begging their husbands to come home to their children before they die.

Pity about the weak ending, though the leads’ wedding with all the now dead characters smiling is a nice touch.

Good Korean ‘scope and colour filming.

Hwa-ryeo-han-hyoo-ga / Hwaryeohan hyuga/ May 18 
Directed by Ji-hoon Kim     

Script Hyeon Na, Sang-yeon Park         
Produced by In-taek Yoo
Original Music by Sung-hyun Kim
Yong-gi Lee    ....     colorist
120 min.  CJ Entertainment, Keyweckshifde Pictures, South Korea 2007
        

Purloined from Chuck Stephens Facebook Page - THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (Orson Welles, USA, Columbia Pictures,1947)

Digitisations, Restorations and Revivals (29) - Classic Selection at the forthcoming New York Film Festival

Associate Editor (Restorations and Revivals) Simon Taaffe has come across the following films being screened at the forthcoming New York Film Festival. Full details if you click here

Jean Vigo

L’Atalante

Dir. Jean Vigo, France, 1934, 89m

Restored by Gaumont in association with The Film Foundation and La Cinémathèque française with the support of Centre National de la Cinématographie. Restoration performed at L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna and Paris.

Bob le flambeur

Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1956, 102m

4K restoration from the interpositive, under the supervision of Studio Canal, with the support of the CNC.

Casa de Lava

Dir. Pedro Costa, Portugal, 1994, 105m

The Crime of Monsieur Lange

Dir. Jean Renoir, France, 1936, 77m

4K restoration from nitrate and safety elements, the internegative and a 35mm print, under the supervision of Studiocanal, with the support of the CNC.

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Daughter of the Nile

Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1987, 91m

L’Enfant secret

Dir. Philippe Garrel, France, 1979, 92m

Digital remaster courtesy of Re:Voir.

Grandeur and Decadence/Grandeur et Décadence

Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1986, 91m

Hallelujah the Hills

Dir. Adolfas Mekas, USA, 1963, 82m

Lucía

Dir. Humberto Solás, Cuba, 1968, 160m

Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). Restoration funded by Turner Classic Movies and The Foundation’s World Cinema Project.

The Old Dark House

Dir. James Whale, USA, 1932, 71m

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t

Dir. Agnès Varda, France, 1977, 107m

Le Révélateur

Dir. Philippe Garrel, France, 1968, 67m

Digital remaster courtesy of Re:Voir.

The Sacrifice

Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden, 1986, 142m

Kenji Mizoguchi

Sansho the Bailiff

Dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1954, 124m

Restored by KADOKAWA Corporation and The Film Foundation at Cineric, Inc. in New York with sound by Audio Mechanics, with the cooperation of The Japan Foundation.

A Story from Chikamatsu

Dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1954, 102m

Restored by KADOKAWA Corporation and The Film Foundation at Cineric, Inc. in New York with sound by Audio Mechanics, with the cooperation of The Japan Foundation.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison reviews the South Korean domestic mega-hit A TAXI DRIVER (Jang Hoon, 2017)

Song Kang-ho, Poster, A Taxi Driver

I keep on wondering if the ethnic circuit movies really are better than the conventionally released films with their bundle of overseas reviews and festival diplomas. Is it just the buzz of having beaten the system and making a discovery or are the films selected to grab foreign speaking viewers genuinely more involving, more imaginative? Either way, the hits just keep coming.

This week you can see Hoon Jang's new South Korean Taeksi Woonjunsa/A Taxi Driver where we kick off with the ubiquitous Kang-ho Song (Swiri, the admirable The Foul King, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, The Host and Snowpiercer), singing along at the wheel with the radio, only to be ticked off by dodging one of the protesters running through the streets of 1980 Seoul and damaging the mirror on his clapped out green taxi. His eleven-year-old daughter keeps on getting into punch-ups with his landlord neighbour’s son. Song has to borrow his outstanding rent.

Thomas Kretschmann, A Taxi Driver

Meanwhile in Japan, news hound Thomas Kretsch-mann (Dario Argento’s Count Dracula and featured player in Der Untergang and Young Victoria) has met BBC Reporter Joey Albright, who just got out of Korea where there’s dangerous instability. Kretschmann is on the next plane with a passport that says Missionary.

In the drivers’ cafe, Song hears about a fare which one of them has lined up to take a foreigner to Guangju for a sum that would square our hero’s debts. He beats the man’s time there, lying to Kretschmann about having been briefed and speaking English. The deal is to get into the riot torn city and back out before curfew but any experienced movie goer knows that’s not going to happen. They encounter a military road block and after some fast talking and consulting an aged peasant about the back roads, the pair make it onto the deserted town streets where a truck load of student protesters attracts Kretschmann’s attention and we get into his filming.

The green Seoul taxi scoots past the student demonstration in Gwangju
A Taxi Driver

All the ‘take the fare money, refuse the fare money’ gets to be repetitive and Song’s conversion from apathetic mercenary to believer is predictable and unconvincing but the situation and Song’s performance keep on grabbing our attention - taking the ailing granny to the casualty packed hospital, watching from the safety of the roof as police vans shoot tear gas grenades into the mob before Kretschmann insists on going in for close-up action, hearing the state news announce that a few Communist agitators have brought in gangsters from Seoul that the military have had to suppress with minimal casualties, Song escaping to the comparative normalcy of the outside world only to double back and re-enthuse the appalled Kretschmann, wounded demonstrators shot down by the line of soldiers with the return of the fat student we’d all forgotten about, the discovery of the incriminating Seoul license plates or the green cabs racing to block the cop cars on the highway.

This one is not tuned to international tastes. Having the leads barely able to communicate with each other is not usual. Conviction tends to wilt where Song is not dominating the frame. Not to go all Dunkirk on its ass but that would be more substantial if Kretschmann wasn’t shooting talking heads with a film camera with no sound gear. He is disturbingly under-characterised, though the actor looks the part. The menacing civilian clothed military police are strip cartoon villains. The film could lose a half hour from its 137 minutes - the night with the friendly locals, the attack on the newspaper -  but the situation and the handling assert in a way that more familiar material does not.

There’s a good standard of production which the theatrical copy does justice.