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The Criterion Channel Presents: Joint Security Area (2000)


If you’re like me, you’ve been checking out the Criterion Channel’s recent collection of Korean New Wave films to distract from all the gloom and doom (or maybe not –it is indeed a weird coping mechanism). And one of the films I discovered in this venture was Joint Security Area, the 2000 breakout film from director Park Chan-wook. It’s a kind of cold war drama set at the Korean DMZ and is unlike the sorts of movies Park is best known for: tense and/or violent thrillers such as his “Vengeance” trilogy, Stoker or The Handmaiden. There’s some modest intensity to Joint Security Area, and some mystery, but it’s actually an extremely humane film, poignant and sincere.
The movie follows the aftermath of a border incident at the titular Joint Security Area at Panmunjom. A South Korean soldier, Sgt. Lee Soo-hyuk (Lee Byung-hun) was spotted fleeing the North Korean border house injured and leaving the bodies of two North Korean guardsmen behind. A threat to the stability of the Armistice, the NNSC assigns a Swiss-Korean Major Sophie Jean (Lee Young-ae) in charge of an investigation into the single surviving soldiers on either side as well as Sgt. Lee’s alibi. Gradually the story unfolds into something more nuanced and interesting.
The bulk of the plot comes out in a flashback that chronicles a covert friendship that develops between Sgt. Lee and his underling Pvt. Nam Sung-sik (Kim Tae-woo) with North Korean Sgt. Oh Kyung-pil (Song Kang-ho) and Pvt. Jung Woo-jin (Shin Ha-kyun), beginning with an act of sympathy when the North soldiers deactivate a mine that Lee has accidentally tripped. Through their subsequent bonding and cultural exchange (mostly from the Southerners) the film incisively comments on the tragedy of the Korean separation. Lee and Oh get along especially well, but there are still lines that can’t be crossed, such as when Lee asks Oh about coming down to the South and that North Korean conditioned loyalty kicks in. In a lot of ways it reminds me of one of my favourite holiday movies, Joyeux Noel, which similarly depicts a shared humanity shining through a circumstance of conflict, and the somberness that it can only be fleeting.
However, Park realizes, arguably unlike Joyeux Noel, that things are more complicated –which he shows with particular starkness in the revelation of what actually happened the night Woo-jin and his commanding officer were killed. And it paints a very curious picture of the psychological states of the people constantly in proximity to this cold conflict, while likewise reflecting North-South relations as a whole.
And Park directs the movie with aplomb. Joint Security Area is full of striking shot compositions, stylized camera movements, and extremely tight editing –there are a lot of immaculate match cuts in this film that give it an intangible smoothness. There’s not the brutality that would characterize some of his later films, but the violence is sharp in the emotion with which it is enacted. In all this, Park relinquishes a lot of power to his actors; Lee Byung-hun and Song Kang-ho –both now major stars of Korean cinema– are particularly exceptional as they make their career breakthroughs alongside Park.
A passionately political film of peace and unity, it’s no surprise that President Roh Moo-hyun presented Joint Security Area to Kim Jong-Il at a 2007 Korean Summit. It is a kind of plea for peace between the two nations, encapsulating a longing for Korea to be one again. To this end it can be a little melodramatic and not always persuasive (Lee Young-ae struggles with her English dialogue –which I’m not entirely sure serves a purpose when her superiors are Swiss), but I think ultimately Park nails the landing, especially with a haunting final shot that communicates literally how close the people of North and South actually are.
 
Criterion Recommendation: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Seeing as Remembrance Day is approaching, I thought it’s worth recommending one of the first great war classics for the collection in All Quiet on the Western Front. The Lewis Milestone-directed adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel about a German soldier’s harrowing experience fighting the First World War is, as I have mentioned a few times, one of the great anti-war films ever made. Vivid and uncompromising as films of that era were permitted to be, it hasn’t lost an ounce of the potency that won it the third Oscar for Best Picture and prompted some to declare it a positive force in the erasure of war glory. Lew Ayres’ lead performance is one of the movies’ unsung strengths as well, particularly in his delivery of the films’ signature speech, directed at a propagandist in the hopes of getting through to his pupils and the audience the sheer trauma and cost of war. It is imperative we listen.

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