Burning

In Lee Chang-Dong's meditative thriller, Burning (2018), Ben, a wealthy young man, yawns very slightly when a beautiful young woman is telling a story to his friends at a dinner party.  The story involves the young woman's trip to Africa and her participation in a tribal dance.  She acts out the dance and the story is naïve and slightly silly.  Later, Ben repeats his yawn, very slight and half-concealed, while another beautiful woman is speaking.  Ben's antagonist, Lee Jong-su, notices the yawn.  He shows no emotion, but we suspect that Lee Jong-su is inwardly outraged -- what gives Ben the right to yawn at things that others intensely desire?  Lee Jong-su's rage is tightly concealed -- it's boiling beneath his placid, even stolidly docile, surface.  The first young woman, Hae-mi, has a cat that always hides from visitors -- the cat is named "Boil".  "An odd name for a cat," Lee Jong-su says.  In Burning, everything is a metaphor -- the entire structure of the film is a series of metaphors that signify tensions and hatreds that Lee Jong-su can't express until the film's nightmarish ending.  Class hatred and jealousy are suppressed by being projected into a series of oblique symbols. 

Burning is a long film, about 2 1/2 hours.  It's never dull, but the film's pace is intentionally slow.  The movie plays with real-time -- it's fulcrum is a long sequence at the center of the picture in which the characters smoke marijuana and watch the sun set.  This twenty minute scene records in actual time, the onset of night -- the characters begin in late afternoon light and end in the gloaming, twilight darkness.  The progression of the sunset gives concrete meaning to the notion of time passing and, further, embodies the familiar sense that time has dilated, that it expands, when you are smoking dope.  The sequence is integral to the movie, teetering on the verge of monotony, but never quite slipping over that edge, and has a dream-like logic difficult to precisely describe.  Movies involve light and time, but, also, duration -- one of Burning's formal characteristics is that it makes duration manifest.

Lee Jong-su is a young man from the South Korea's provinces.  He's poor and, sometimes, acts like a peasant.  In fact, he wants to be a writer and admires William Faulkner.  (Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning" is a source for the film, although the picture is ostensibly an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's story of the same name.)  Jong-su meets a beautiful young girl from his village.  She is working as a hostess, dancing around with a microphone and wearing a skimpy outfit to get people to enter a glitzy retail store.  This girl, Hae-me, claims that Jong-su saved her when she fell down a well.  She was seven at the time and Jong-su has no memory of this incident.  She tells Jong-su that he made fun of her appearance when she was in seventh grade -- "I've now had plastic surgery," she says, perkily.  Hae-mi is going to Africa for three weeks and so she needs someone to watch her cat, Boil.  She invites Jong-su to her apartment, an odd-shaped tower under a hill that receives light only once a day when the sun reflects off a huge transmission tower on a hilltop.  Hae-mi invites Jong-su to have sex with her -- this is a long scene, also shot in real-time without much in the way of edits.  Then, she vanishes, apparently to Africa.  (She wants to see the Bushmen in the Kalahari who differentiate between the "little hunger", that is appetite, and the "great hunger", that is a metaphysical yearning for meaning in the world.)  Jong-su misses her and masturbates in her bed and at her window when he comes to the apartment to feed her hidden cat.  Later, Hae-mi returns.  She has picked-up a handsome young man, Ben, at the Nairobi Airport -- they're departure was delayed due to a terrorist attack.  Ben's fine features are always on the edge of a smirk and he is mysterious -- Jong-su, who knows his American literature, calls him "the Great  Gatsby."  Ben drives a black Porsche and lives in a spectacular, if somewhat vacant seeming, apartment in Gangnam, apparently a very wealthy neighborhood in Seoul.  Jong-su's father is a stubborn man who owns a little farm and has beat up an official.  He is in jail, awaiting sentencing for his crime.  The Judge tells him that he can receive a reduced sentence or, even, no punishment at all, if he apologizes for the crime, but he is obstinate.  Jong-su is staying at the family farm, a ramshackle apartment and barn where there is one forlorn calf in the dung-filled barn.  The phone keeps ringing but there is nobody on the line.  The farm is so close to the North Korean border that Jong-su can hear propaganda broadcast over the border, a shrill voice speaking unintelligibly in the distance.  Jong-su is eerily polite and indifferent to the fact that Ben has stolen his beautiful girlfriend; he doesn't seem to react at all.  Ben comes to the farm and, with Hae-mi, they smoke a joint.  Hai-mi strips off her clothes and dances in the sunset.  Jong-su says that his father made him burn his mother's clothes when she abandoned the family -- Jong-su has not seen his mother for 16 years.  Ben, then, admits that his hobby is burning down greenhouses -- Korea is full "of nasty, old smelly greenhouses," Ben says, and he likes to light them on fire.  Ben says that he intends to burn down a greenhouse very near to the place where Jong-su lives.  He tells Jong-su that he needs to be more passionate.  Ben puts his hand over his heart and says that Jong-su needs to get the "bass beating there", an excitement that he experiences when he burns down a greenhouse.  (The gesture of hand to the heart is apparently important in Korea -- as it happened, the night I watched Burning, a boy-band named BTS performed on Saturday Night Live.  BTS is the most popular band in the world.  One of their signature moves is to strike a pose with hand placed over heart.)  As Ben and Hae-mi are leaving, Jong-su angrily says to Hae-mi that she must be a whore to "take her clothes off in front of men so readily" -- we have the sense that he is, perhaps, channeling his father's rage and misogyny.  Jong-su regrets the comment and tries to call Hae-mi but she doesn't respond.  He jogs around the neighborhood looking to see if Ben has burned down any of the nearby greenhouses, but finds no evidence of fire.  Hae-mi has vanished and no one knows where she had gone.  (In South Korea, apparently, all young people are drowning in credit card debt and there is surmise that she has gone into hiding to avoid creditors.)  Jong-su suspects that Ben has done something to Hae-mi.  He follows him around Seoul in his ugly, clunky-looking farm truck.  Ben, who is now reading Faulkner, confronts Jong-su and said that Hae-mi told him that Jong-su meant a lot to her -- "this made me jealous," Ben says, "and, you know, I'm never jealous.  Jong-su goes to party at Ben's apartment and discovers a cat.  The cat answers to the name "Boil."  He also finds Hae-mi's wristwatch in a drawer full of women's necklaces and accessories -- there is a faint, but unmistakable, implication that Ben is a serial killer.  At one point, there is a discussion about metaphors and, we understand, that burning down greenhouses is probably metaphoric for something else, perhaps, murder.  When Ben vowed to burn down a greenhouse "very close" to Jong-su, he may have meant that he intended to kill Hae-mi. 

The film divides into two parts, before Hae-mi vanishes and after her disappearance.  The scenes after her disappearance seem to channel Hitchcock's Vertigo -- there are long sequences of Jong-su in her car trailing Ben's sleek black Porsche.  As in Vertigo, Seoul like San Francisco seems increasingly mysterious and enigmatic.  Ben's motives are impossible to ascertain -- we see him driving into a desolate area with abandoned quarries and farms and, then, peering down at a half-empty reservoir.   In many respects, the movie's encrypted tone and its involute characters resemble elements of films by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, including most notably Once upon a Time in Anatolia, a picture also obsessed with sunsets, twilight, and the passage of time.  (Of course, another influence is Antonioni's vanished girl in L'Avventura.)  The picture is full of odd indirections, hints and clues -- although we don't know what the clues mean.  In one scene, mostly shot in a mirror, Jong-su goes to a dance studio and watches people performing gestures that look like Tai Chi.  The dancers sinuously wiggle their fingers and arms in the air, the same gesture that Hae-mi made when she danced naked to the setting sun.  The dancers also clap their hands to their hearts with the same gesture made by Ben when he tells Jong-su that he needs to live with more passion.  The plot suggests that Ben and Jong-su are doubles of some sort -- we see Jong-su, for instance, fantasizing himself as a child watching a burning greenhouse (the greenhouse seems a screen memory for his father demanding that the child burn his mother's clothing); Ben takes up reading Faulkner and seems strangely drawn to Jong-su.  A political allegory is faintly suggested -- the cosmopolitan Ben and the intensely introverted Jong-su seem to represent the two Korean states.  First, Jong-su possesses the beautiful woman, then, Ben -- and, then, together, it seems, they act to destroy her.  This political subtext of competition for what may be viewed as the soul of Korea is, further, suggested by North Korean propaganda bleated out over the border near Jong-su's desolate farm. 

Burning is long and, throughout, nothing much seems to be going on.  It's not a flawless picture -- the subplot involving Jong-su's father is not clearly articulated and a scene in which Jong-su meets with his mother adds nothing to the film and is hard to understand.  But the picture expands in your imagination.  You can't get it out of your mind and many of its images persist in your head days after you saw the film.  It's quite extraordinary.