www.camerastylo.com
www.camerastylo.com
Peppermint
Candy (no distributor)
New Directors/New Films
March 31, April 1
Peppermint Candy, director Lee Chang-Dong's second feature and an ambitious charting of recent Korean history via the perspective of an individual who lost out in the nation's development, opens in the present with its protagonist's suicidal leap in front of a speeding train. Ending some twenty years earlier, amidst the brief period of optimism following the assassination of virtual dictator Park Chung-Hee in October 1979, it traces in between antihero Yong-Ho's fall in reverse chronology, with episodes in time that coincide with watershed events in South Korea's convulsive transformation from near-fascist industrial state to one of Asia's booming "mini-dragon" economies.
Despite the central narrative stunt, those seeking formal or structural pleasures may be disappointed. Less a rigorous filmmaker than an intuitive, populist storyteller, Lee is least comfortable when the film is most stylized: the use of reverse-motion footage to bookend each narrative episode doesn't just appear bland but oddly noncommittal, accompanied as it were by music even more curiously faceless than the images. Yet it's with considerable panache that Lee fashions the perennial loser myth out of historical material: confidently schematic, un-self-consciously sentimentalized, Peppermint Candy is old-fashioned melodrama that doesn't shy away from representing its protagonist's hopes and regrets via a long-lost love.
Given the film's penchant for archetypes, actor Sol Kyung-Gu's neatly impressive turn comes across as less performance than illustration. Revealed at film's end to be a gentle, flower-picking soul content in life merely to take landscape photos and relax in the sun, the remarkably vacant Yong-Ho exists less as a character with individual quirks than as a passive everyman on which Lee projects the anxieties and frustrations of his generation. There are no surprising idiosyncrasies to the character, nor does Sol invest him with any personal mannerisms. Whether when reeling from having shot a student as part of the military forces suppressing the Kwangju uprising, or as a neophyte police interrogator compelled to torture a dissident, he reacts more than he acts, and generally as one would expect him to, following the overall trajectory of the corruption of an innocent. The effect might be too generalized for some, but it's in keeping with the film's aspirations for the mythic.
Not that the film's laid-back aesthetic doesn't have its drawbacks. Decidedly non-severe, it emasculates, or at least makes appear softer than it actually is, Lee's criticism of the oppressive regimes his character suffers under. The thesis is sound: pinning down the Kwangju massacre as the decisive wrecking ball in Yong-Ho's life, Lee also sees the repressive, police-state practices of 1980s South Korea as expediting his protagonist's downfall. Crucially, Yong-Ho transforms from victim to equal-parts victim and victimizer as his life progresses, most conspicuously in the brutal, abusive treatment of his wife, a neighborhood Christian girl he marries out of circumstance. From chilly neglect to a violent beating, the relationship hints at the frightening subtext: the transference of violence and oppression on a public and state level into the private and domestic realm.
And yet, in the absence of rigor, the effect is less trenchant than it might have been. Still, one has to give Lee credit for the almost cruel wit with which he renders bittersweet the film's eponymous, near corny fetish-object. When offered one at the picnic finale of the film, Yong-Ho asks Sunim, lifelong love and the film's idealized object of desire, if she enjoys peppermint candies. "I try to," she answers. "At the factory, I wrap a thousand of them a day."
All written material (c) 2002 by Derek Lam