Burning
Beoning
Lee Chang-dong (2018)
What the South Korean film Burning means to say is not obvious. For a long time – and this is a long (148-minute) picture – Lee Chang-dong strongly implies that elusiveness is his true main theme. He shows his protagonist Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in) engaged in often apparently mundane domestic activities yet the time taken to describe them gives these activities a curious, increasing weight. After a while, you’re not only absorbed by what you’re watching but aware that the perplexing effect of watching it is part of your absorption. At the start of the film, Jongsu has a chance reunion in Seoul with Haemi (Jeon Jong-seo), whom he knew when they were growing up in the same rural area outside Paju, close to the border with North Korea. While they’re having a reunion drink together, Haemi tells Jongsu she’s attending mime classes. She pretends to eat an invisible piece of fruit – a performance which fascinates Jongsu (and us). She says the technique comes in handy when you’re hungry: ‘Don’t think there is a tangerine here,’ says Haemi, ‘but forget there isn’t one’. Her mime announces Burning’s beguiling quality, her motto the film’s puzzling features and disappearing acts.
Having raised the subject of hunger, Haemi distinguishes two kinds, literal and existential. Kalahari bushmen describe the latter as the ‘greater hunger’ and Haemi, who’s been working as a shopgirl (which is how Jongsu bumps into her), is about to travel to Africa. Regarding the lesser, physical hunger, she asks Jongsu to feed her cat while she’s away, and he agrees. When he goes to her Seoul apartment to receive instructions, Jongsu and Haemi have sex there. Once she’s gone abroad, he returns regularly to feed Boil (Haemi says she found the cat in the boiler room of her apartment building) but never at any stage sees the animal. Jongsu spends most of his time at his family home, a farmhouse outside Paju. This too is now empty: his mother is dead; his father, a struggling cattle farmer, got into trouble with the authorities and, after being charged with assault on an official, is serving a prison sentence. Well before the time Haemi returns home, Jongsu is preoccupied with her. He’s disturbed and disappointed, when he goes to meet het, that Haemi is accompanied by another young man, the self-assured Ben (Steven Yeun). She met him in Africa and he seems now to be her lover.
The three spend some time together. When they go out for dinner, Haemi recalls an African sunset whose beauty made her want to disappear. While she and Ben are visiting Jongsu at the farm, she remembers that, when they were children, she fell into a nearby well and Jongsu rescued her, though he has no memory of this. A while later, he receives a phone call, apparently from Haemi though she doesn’t speak and the call cuts off after a few seconds. This is the last that Jongsu hears from her. Burning’s leitmotif of absence culminates in Haemi’s vanishment, which also seals the convergence of the protagonist’s and the audience’s mystification. Jongsu’s fruitless (the tangerine wasn’t there) search for her complements the viewer’s ‘greater hunger’ to understand the story. Yet all the time Lee Chang-dong has been carefully – and, because the film’s enigmatic aspects dominate attention, unobtrusively – building a social perspective, centred on the very different circumstances of Jongsu and Ben.
At least until he returns to the farm, Jongsu has been working as an odd-job-man but he’s completed a college creative writing course and wants to write professionally. It’s unclear how the Porsche-driving, pot-smoking[1] Ben earns the money needed to support his affluent lifestyle but clear that he epitomises metropolitan privilege, in contrast to the increasingly hardscrabble rural life represented by Jongsu (and his father). Ben asks him more than once about his writing and, when Jongsu expresses admiration for William Faulkner, Ben gets one of his books, telling Jongsu that he’s decided, in the light of his recommendation, to give Faulkner a go. The thoroughly entitled Ben makes it sound not as if he’s making an effort to engage with Faulkner, more that it’s up to Faulkner to make reading him worth Ben’s while.
A conversation between Jongsu and Ben also supplies crucial imagery, and the title, of the film. (The screenplay, by the director and Oh Jung-mi, is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story Barn Burning, whose title is also that of a Faulkner short story.) During his and Hae-mi’s visit to the farm, Ben tells Jongsu about his surprising hobby: every couple of months, he burns down an abandoned greenhouse. When Jongsu asks why, Ben says he wants to get rid of these ‘useless, filthy, unpleasant-looking’ structures; they appear to him to be waiting to be destroyed. The visualisation of the greenhouses does more than justice to this description: they’re a mournfully dilapidated sight – a million miles away from the sleek, expensive order of the arsonist’s apartment. The wanton destruction of them becomes the focus of Jongsu’s growing antipathy towards Ben, who tells him the next greenhouse will be one close to his father’s farm. Jongsu replies that he’ll keep an eye out for this. In the days that follow, he does so conscientiously but sees no fires. It’s while he’s standing by one of the local greenhouses that Jongsu receives the aborted phone call seemingly from Haemi. He soon begins to think her disappearance is also connected to Ben’s attitude of disposing of things as he pleases.
The developing socio-economic concerns of Burning never quite displace its mystery. This operates at two levels, which might be labelled, in the way that Haemi defined hungers, as ‘lesser’ and ‘greater’ mystery. The ‘lesser’ details encourage the audience to try to piece things together as if Lee Chang-dong were telling a more conventional crime-thriller story. At the start, Jongsu encounters Haemi while she and another girl are on the street, selling tickets for a prize draw. Jongsu wins a cheap watch with a bright pink wristband that he immediately gives to Haemi. Later on, and deeply suspicious of Ben, he finds in a bathroom drawer in the latter’s apartment an identical watch. This could be significant but might not be, given that the watch is obviously mass-produced: we see one too on the wrist of another shopgirl with whom Jongsu gets into conversation during his search for Haemi. (The second watch-wearer makes a short, interesting speech to the effect that South Korea is ‘no country for women’, who are expected to adapt their appearance and identity to fulfil the expectations placed upon them.) We know too that, since Haemi departed the scene, Ben has taken up with another pretty working girl. Jongsu also encounters a cat at Ben’s place and seems to believe it’s Haemi’s never-before-seen Boil, although Ben’s story of how he came by the cat suggests otherwise. Is he lying or is Jongsu jumping to conclusions?
The ‘greater’ mystery details cast doubt on perception and memory in a different way. Jongsu tells Ben no greenhouse has burned down in the vicinity since their conversation; Ben assures him that one has. As for Haemi, Jongsu doesn’t even recognise her when they first meet up; she tells him she’s had plastic surgery in the meantime. The well from which he doesn’t remember rescuing her no longer exists. When Jongsu asks Haemi’s mother, in the café where she now works, about the incident, she has no recollection of it either. Although this might seem to endorse Jongsu’s memory, its effect is to increase his uncertainty – a feeling that he has no purchase on his past, let alone his future. (Lee repeatedly uses shots, from the point of view of within Jongsu’s pick-up truck, of the road ahead – shots that convey irresistible forward movement rather than a sense of direction.) On the last occasion that Ben asks him about the progress of his writing, Jongsu replies that, since the world is a complete mystery to him, he isn’t able even to begin to write. A few moments later, however, he’s working at a computer, with an uncharacteristically purposeful look on his face.
Until the startling finale, the only visible burning occurs in a short dream sequence, in which Jongsu sees himself, as a young boy, confronted by a greenhouse ablaze. At the climax to the story, he arranges, on the pretext that he’ll be accompanied by Haemi, to meet Ben on a country road. There, Jongsu stabs Ben several times and kills him. He douses Ben’s corpse and car in petrol, and removes his own bloody clothes, before using Ben’s cigarette lighter to ignite the vehicle and its contents. Jongsu returns, naked and freezing cold, to his pick-up truck and drives off. The conflagration is a shocking act of revenge on the depredations of Ben (and his kind) yet it prompts Burning’s last and expanding question. Has the murder actually happened or is it, rather, the conclusion to the story that Jongsu now knows to write? If the latter, how much of what went before on the screen described the workings of the imagination of the would-be author and central consciousness of the film?
This is an authentically thought-provoking piece of cinema (as well as a hard one to write about) and a considerable balancing act. Lee Chang-dong plays on illusion and elusion with sustained inventiveness – but without detracting from his critique of increasing economic disparities in a ‘wealthy’ society that fuels the helplessness and anger of have-nots within it. As Jongsu, Ah-in Soo moves subtly but decisively from taciturn lack of reaction to near-obsession with Haemi, from awkward inadequacy in the presence of Ben to violent enmity towards him. Lee Sung-hyun (aka Mowg) wrote the distinctive dissonant score. The impressive cinematography is by Hong Kyung-pyo. One of the bits of blurb on the poster for the film, from the Daily Telegraph, says it ‘blazes with mystery’, which may be code for: I haven’t a clue what’s going on beyond the fire trope. This viewer may not have a clue either but I do think Burning’s mystery is singularly rich.
5 February 2019
[1] Tony Rayns’s Sight & Sound review (March 2019) notes that marijuana is ‘highly illegal and almost unobtainable’ in Korea and Japan.