The film "Burning" by Korean director Lee Chang-dong in the story Haruki Murakami "Burn the Barn". In my opinion, the lyric and superficial sketch of the writer about three young people with eccentricities in the film adaptation turned into a deep psychological thriller about the impossibility of knowing oneself and others.
At the Cannes Film Festival, something is not shown - from the legends of Brazilian Indians to the screen to the first lesbian drama from Kenya. On the general variegated background, films in which the ethnographic element retreats before the "universal" are less frequent and more valuable. Wherever their action takes place, viewers from any country will equally feel and appreciate them. This is exactly the "Burning" of Korean director Lee Chang-dong. It is not for nothing that he was filmed according to the story of the Japanese Haruki Murakami, whose action was transferred to Korea, and two of the three main characters meet in Africa, although both live in Seoul. However, the roots of the cosmopolitanism of Lee Chang-dong are not in these interethnic paradoxes, but in what and how he made his film.
Jong-Su (the young star of the Korean movie Yoo Ah-in) is a delivery service worker. One day, he meets a childhood acquaintance Hae-mi (debutant Jeon Jong-seo) on the street and does not recognize her: she had plastic surgery and was transformed. They start a romance and immediately part - Hae-mi leaves for a trip to Africa, leaving his cat Jong-Su. She returns no longer alone. The flight was delayed, and at the airport she became friends with the only Korean who was there at the time — the secured dandy-businessman Ben (Steven Yeun from "The Walking Dead"). The girl cannot choose between two gentlemen - and they spend time together, more and more often feeling the tension hanging in the air.
The situation described in the film could happen anywhere, the feelings of all three characters - from mutual attraction to acute jealousy - are easy to understand and share. However, "Burning" is still a Korean film; For example, it is important to know that Jong-Su’s father’s farm, where Hae-mi and Ben come to visit him, is near the North Korean border, from where the sound of radio propaganda comes from the speakers day and night. Lee Chang-dong, on the one hand, predicts the rapprochement and negotiations of the two Koreas, which are now in the mind of each inhabitant, and, on the other, introduces the motif of borderness, proximity, and similarity of opposites.
On the threshold of the house (that is, again on the border), the three heroes will innocently break the law, having smoked one joint for three, and Hae-mi will dance in the light of the setting sun an erotic dance. Ben confesses his criminal hobby: he burns greenhouses (they were sheds for Murakami) - he chooses for a long time, and then sets fire to arson every two months. He has such a hobby. Only Jong-Su will try to keep within the limits of decency. He is plagued by a couple of painful memories from his childhood, also connected with fire (he made a fire from the things of a mother who had left the family), and the aggressive father, who received a prison sentence for another outburst of violence, is terribly annoying. Jong-Su is trying his best to be a normal, ordinary person and is suspiciously eyeing those who, he thinks, violate this norm. So, imperceptibly going over the notorious border, and become paranoid: its failure will be the most terrible of all.
The Murakami story is a lyrical sketch, a bit in the spirit of Truman Capote. In it, they say, nothing happens. Even the recognition of a rich stranger that he is a secret pyromanus is not confirmed by anything, and soon he and the girl disappear from the narrator’s sight. The film Lee Chang-dong, which for a rather long time has been scrupulously following the Murakami storyline, is completely different. The place of aerial semi-affection is occupied by physiological relationships, and then their agonizing absence. The disappearance of the girl causes serious suspicions about her and her new acquaintance. An essay on human strangeness turns into a psychological thriller. Even the favorite Murakami jazz music, which the Korean director obediently inserts into the soundtrack, sounds more depressive and darker to the final. In addition, the film becomes deeper and deeper, surpassing the charmingly superficial original source.
Laureate of Cannes and Venice, as well as former South Korean Minister of Culture Lee Chang-dong is one of the most extraordinary authors in contemporary Korean cinema. He is not keen on genre experiments, like Park Chan-wook or Bong Joon-ho (whose operator Hong Gyeong-pyo perfectly "shot “Burning"), and does not allow frivolous intellectual bravado, as a favorite of festivals Hong Sang-soo. His path - the hidden and painful side of everyday life. About them the most famous of his films - "Oasiseu", "Milyang", "Shi". Lee Chang-dong is Dostoevsky's faithful heir; By the way, he began as a successful writer, and it is no coincidence that his hero Jong-Su in "Burning" also dreams of writing a novel one-day.
https://youtu.be/wi6Kw7V8gXk[Burning trailer official (English) from Cannes](https://youtu.be/wi6Kw7V8gXk)
In the Lee Lee Chang-dong cinema, life is just as whimsical and unpredictable as literature - but his screenwriting is devoid of emphasized literary character, it tends to simplicity and naturalness. He is a virtuoso psychologist, which does not prevent him from operating with sweeping metaphors and seeing the transcendent through the everyday.
"Burning" is a picture of a man as the biggest mystery of the universe, a locked box, the key of which is not even lost, but has not yet been created. Hence the torment in love, impulsive actions, incomprehensible to us by mania, phobias, strangeness. The fire is burning, but it is unknown where to find suitable fuel for it. If there is no better, let them be at least abandoned greenhouses.
The illustrations are used in agreement with the Depositphotos photobank
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