L O N D O N   G R I P        .  .  .        F  I  L  M

December 2010

MICHAEL DAVENPORT

reviews a new film from South Korea


71 into the Fire


Director: John H. Lee

Cast includes:

Choi Seung-Hyun, Kwon Sang-Woo and Cha Seung-Wong


View trailer at

http://www.cine-asia.co.uk/trailer/71-Into-the-Fire/196/


In June 1950, North Korean forces, backed and armed by the Soviet Union, had been sweeping down the Korean peninsula for four months.  The lightly-armed (by the US) Southern forces could but retreat. 71 into the Fire is a Korean-made film which tells the story of seventy-one young school boys – average age 16 - who are conscripted into the South Korean army to try to hold back the invading forces. After a number of skirmishes and deaths among the schoolboys, their final battle is one in which the surviving boys defend a school critically situated on the final defense line of the Nakdong River against the élite North Korean 766 Commando Brigade and their tanks.  The battle lasts eleven hours though the outcome is never in doubt. The bravery of the boys is such that there are no survivors but they give the US-South Korean forces time to hold a strategic bridgehead which makes a significant contribution to the final victory of the South. 

The characters of the principals among the 71 boys are largely based on an unposted letter found in the pocket of one of the dead soldiers. But there is also a brave hero on the North Korean side. Before the final battle the commander of the North Korean forces, Park Moo-rang, has found out that the holders of the school are just a small group of young boys.  He visits them unarmed to demand their surrender. This causes dissension among the boys and one of them, Gab-jo, who unlike the others had been conscripted from prison rather than school, has a fight with the teenager in command, Jang-bom, and leaves the camp. However at a critical moment he returns with weapons taken from the North Koreans and fights alongside Jang-bom to the bitter end. 

The production values are high. The acting is consistently first-rate, in particular the boys’ commander, Jang-bom, played by Choi Seung-Hyun, also known as TOP - a rapper in the Korean pop group Bigbang. Gab-jo is played by Kwon Sang-Woo. General Park is played with humour and subtlety by Cha Seung-Wong. The director is John H. Lee who was responsible for The Moment to Remember, a great success in Korea and Japan in 2004. The battles are choreographed on a large scale and the landscape is often magnificent, as in the skirmish scene in a field of reeds on Hwang Mae mountain.

The most striking feature of the film is its extreme violence. Right from the start we see vivid scenes of soldiers being wounded, squirting blood, evisceration and limbs hanging off.  Even those few scenes where sensitive relations are portrayed, such as the short wistful encounter between Jang-bom and his hospital nurse or the moments of hysteria as the boys leave their wailing mothers, are submerged in melodrama.

But the film does remind us how adversarial this war has made the relations between North and South Korea, how they think of themselves as culturally, even ethnically, different and why the North has threatened that new military cooperation between the US and the South could lead to a nuclear attack. 


Cine Asia will release 71 into the Fire

on DVD and BLU-RAY

on 14th March 2011.

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November 2010

PATRICIA MORRIS reviews


Another Year


Director/writer:  Mike Leigh

Cast includes:

Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville, Oliver Maltman, Peter Wight, David Bradley, Karina Fernandez, Martin Savage, Imelda Staunton.


Mike Leigh, socialist film director par excellence and documentarist of “ordinary people”, yet again catches us out with another apparently slow fly-on-the-wall record of plain lives which suddenly turns and slaps us about the face with a thought-provoking take on New Testament conundrums.


In Another Year he first relaxes us with a fresh representation of familiar everyday life, then sticks us in the guts with the implied question, “Hold on, who exactly is the good guy here?” That is, whose side am I on - once I see more clearly? Which of the characters do I most resemble, and do I want to? How does one recognize the person one wants to identify with as opposed to the person to run away from, who ejects poison? 


The mark of Leigh’s brilliance, the kind of mark which distinguishes him as an exceptional story-teller, is that just when it suits him, he drops the viewer from a great height into the seat of a character being interrogated.  Finally one must ask the moral question not only of the figures in the movie but of oneself, the judge who has been slouched in the cinema comfortably witnessing the proceedings.


Gerri, a psychological counselor, and her husband Tom, a geologist, live simply and wisely. Theirs are the achievements society wants us to aspire to. Through the seasons they labour contentedly in their bucolic allotment. They are benign, parental figures who draw towards their warm home the waifs and strays, the failures.  From the enviable solidarity of their companionable relationship they offer straight talk and concerned solutions to the difficulties with which others grapple but never resolve.


Mary, a desperately lonely, promiscuous, socially inept and annoyingly needy clerical worker at Gerri’s surgery, over twenty years has developed an attachment to the family, including their son Joe.  She flirts inappropriately with him but he deflects her middle-aged advances with light-handed ease. When Joe at last finds a young girlfriend, Mary is devastated - as if she had a sexual claim upon him - and is viciously rude to her. Gerri, polite as ever, immediately drops Mary.


Autumn turns to winter and when we next see Mary she is in despair, presenting herself at the house in a terrible emotional and physical state. From this moment in the film, all our easy character assessments are dislodged from their safe positions. The way the family responds at the time to Mary’s state of mind requires our reconsideration. And not only that: all that has gone before, we must compute again.


Didn’t that early scene where we watched Gerri counselling a depressed patient reveal a certain smug insensitivity? Joe, a young lawyer in a worthy post helping immigrants with housing difficulties, did in fact speak to his clients in his familiar joking tone which really expressed arrogant condescension, and we realize that he was similarly patronizing when he toyed with Mary’s embarrassing flirtations. His father Tom, always benign and jolly and doing and saying the right thing, in fact never exhibits any full-blooded emotion: in a sense he isn’t  ever really there. We find ourselves reassessing our stereotyping of Tom’s entirely dissimilar brother, Ronnie, who is in a state of shock following the recent death of his un-beloved wife.  Perhaps it is not only shock that renders him uncommunicative but that he is always incapable of the clichés and platitudes we now see that Tom and Gerri are so skilled at producing.


We start to take a different view. Leigh seems to be proposing that to be “normal” is to live a lie without being aware of it, to be half dead. The people who behave badly, who are needy, “weird”, “emotionally unstable” – are the ones who feel with intensity and who are actually alive. We may not enjoy their company, but that is hardly the point. It is they who know important things about being a person of which so-called achievers, with all their show and talk, have no inkling.


And the pastoral image of the keepers of the allotment in which the seasons unfold, year upon year, now transfigures, retrospectively, into something sinister: a post-Edenic garden, serpentine. It is our world.  Horrifying.




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June 2010

PATRICIA MORRIS reviews


The Time That Remains


Director/writer/actor: Elia Suleiman


A sad film questioning the present Palestinian ideology of protest.


The opening scene positions us: the fare is Palestinian, the taxi-driver is a genial, stalwart Hebrew speaker, and the destination is unnamed and far-away.  They are in a strange dark place in a violent storm that sounds like gunfire.  The taxi driver soon stops the car and confesses that he is completely lost.


The movie provides a brief history from 1948 of Palestine's slide from high idealism and heroic endeavour to present-day impotence, the people’s voluntary trivialisation of political ideals and protest.  It explores the unconscious paradox - the current dismissal of traditional values and the violent reaction against the threat of so-called imperialism - simultaneous with the Palestinian youth culture's emulation of the ugliest aspects of Western society - mobile phones, western pop, bling and bravado in drunken brawls that, would that it were not so, have nothing to do with politics.


This is a difficult and deeply political movie about loss and being lost, not much resembling its ubiquitous billing as dark comedy akin to Tati’s or Keaton’s.


A mundane word of warning: the film has sub-titles and if you can't tell the difference between Hebrew and Arabic speech, following the nuanced choice of language throughout may make it hard-going deciphering some of the movie’s codes.



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1 June 2010