movie review: bleak night
There’s an unnerving rawness to Lee Chang Dong’s films. Simply put, he’s not afraid to reveal everything. From shrieking emotions to moments of utter desperation, Lee’s films, from Peppermint Candy to Poetry, are really about opening, exploring and thoroughly examining the pains of human interconnections. The uber-realism that Lee utilizes is echoed in Yoon Sung Hyun’s debut film, Bleak Night. But the comparison ends with the tone. Whereas Lee’s films are often driven by the story, Yoon’s film is perfectly satisfied with not telling the full story. In fact, it’s amazing how a 2 hour running time can reveal so much text without revealing anything at all.
The skeleton story is this: Three best friends in high school, Ki Tae, Dong Yoon, and Baek Hee, are finishing up their junior year. Through the use of flashbacks, it’s revealed that Ki Tae has died while Dong Yoon has dropped out of school and Baek Hee transferred out and moved out of the neighborhood. Ki Tae’s absent father seeks out his son’s friends in an effort to shed some light on what happened. And that’s exactly where the viewer winds up as well. Even the most basic information about Ki Tae’s death is never revealed. Was it a suicide? An accident? There are other elements to the story that are only hinted at. It’s like having a huge box being placed on your doorstep, but you can only take a peek at it through the smallest crack. And even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at, you like what you see.
This is obviously a small budget film despite the fact that CJ Entertainment – the most prominent movie studio in Korea – is the distributor of this notable film. Almost all shots are hand held which allows a steady flow of movement as the narrative creates three main story arcs. The indoor shoots were not done in a studio, so when the camera is not moving, there’s a lot of shot-reverse-shot, and consequently, a lot of tight shots as well. Despite these seeming restrictions, the movie is a fresh injection of creativity to recent Korean cinema. While watching the fluidity of the drama unroll slowly and methodically, I couldn’t have been happier to watch a Korean film that wasn’t about revenge, truly excessive violence, or any of the other recent, hyperbolic movie trends. Instead, the film is held together by a purposely cryptic script and three of the best male performances I’ve seen in years. The three main actors, Lee Jee Hoon (Ki Tae), Seo Jun Young (Dong Yoon), and Park Jung Min (Baek Hee), are all surprisingly adept and honest, and much like the movie, they reveal enough without betraying the spirit of the movie.
Bleak Night premiered last year at the Pusan Film Festival, where it received the New Currents Award. That’s a pretty good start for a director that shows a lot of promise.
