Thursday, February 15, 2007

Welcome to Dongmakgol

Park Kwang-hyun, South Korea, 2005
3 out of 4 stars

This is something of a high-concept drama, lighthearted at times, but one that takes its subject, the Korean War, very seriously of course. It involves soldiers from the North, the South, and even the US who end up separated from their colleagues and take refuge in the titular village, an inexplicably utopian settlement that has something of an Edenic quality to it, as the villagers don’t even understand what the guns do, leading of of the funniest standoff scenes I’ve ever seen. The filmmakers wisely avoid making these unsophisticated country folk the butt of any jokes, while similarly avoiding any heavy-handed, didactic speeches. Instead, there are some spectacular visual scenes, although I wasn’t always entirely sold on the style used in some of them, particularly the boar scene. The characters are a little thin, too, although this may not be entirely inadvertent.

I mentioned earlier that there is actually an American soldier in the town along with the soldiers from the two Koreas, and I can only figure that he is there for balance, because, overall, the Americans are portrayed with visual and musical queues that remind the viewer of the Empire from Star Wars. While I think it would be an exaggeration to say that this film is entirely a straightforward political allegory, it’s hard not to draw parallels with how many Koreans in the south today feel about America’s role in the division of the peninsula.

Source: KD DVD
14 February, 11:15 PM

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