황해 The Yellow Sea 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Yellow Sea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ha Jung-woo as a hapless taxi driver in “The Yellow Sea.”

 

 

 

 

The Blood Runs Freely, but the Dogs Can't

 

by Manohla Dargis

Published: December 1, 2011

 

 

This being the season for Oscar puffery and pretention, it’s also the time of the year when moviegoers who yearn for more action and less talk can be forgiven for thinking that what’s missing from the big screen is a good beat down. It could use one: this hasn’t been a memorable year for cinematic action, aside from a quicksilver move here and there and that gone-in-60-seconds moment in “Drive” when Ryan Gosling glides a car into park. But now there’s “The Yellow Sea,” a rush of a movie from South Korea that slips and slides from horror to humor on rivers of blood and offers the haunting image of a man, primitive incarnate, beating other men with an enormous, gnawed-over meat bone.

 

 

Even on second viewing, that bone scene is a shocker in a movie with more than one. When I first saw “The Yellow Sea” in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was shown under the bluntly literal title “The Murderer,” the audience burst into applause several times, jolted by the choreographed frenzy of the movie’s car and foot chases. Those chases are so exciting, and the blood is so unnerving, that I didn’t at first realize that they’re in service to a moral tale, one in which the struggle between good and evil plays out in often unsettling visual terms: that bone isn’t just a convenient weapon but also an emblem of this man-eat-dog, man-kill-man world.

 

 

Dogs, dead or furiously barking and snapping, are a recurrent motif in “The Yellow Sea,” which opens with its hapless central character, a taxi driver, Gu-nam (Ha Jung-woo, subtle and moving), relating a story in voice-over. When he was young, Gu-nam says, his dog became rabid, a killer. The local villagers tried to destroy the animal, but it ran off only to return later, whereupon it lay down and died. After Gu-nam buried his dog, the elders dug it up and devoured the carcass. “The rabies that vanished has come back,” he says. “It’s going around.” on screen, a photo of an unsmiling child gives way to the adult Gu-nam losing at mah-jongg, a suggestion of generational misery.

 

 

Written and directed by Na Hong-jin, “The Yellow Sea” follows Gu-nam as he descends into a nightmare that he helps create. The story takes off in Yanji, the capital of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, a wedge of China that borders North Korea and Russia. Initially, Gu-nam, an ethnic Korean (or chosun-juk), spends his time losing money at mahjongg, driving a cab or passed out in his squalid apartment, where a web of broken glass covering a framed wedding photo of him and his wife hints at the tragic misunderstanding that sets the story in fast, fast motion. His wife has left to find work in South Korea, and Gu-nam, bereft, angry, self-pitying, has built up a debt that he seems unlikely to work or gamble his way out of.

 

 

When he can’t pay what he owes, he lands before a gangster, Myun-ga (Kim Yun-seok, in a tour de force performance), who will wipe out Gu-nam’s debt if he kills a man. Stoop-shouldered and somewhat sleepy, Myun-ga doesn’t look like much of a danger, but menace radiates off him, especially because he makes his offer in a dog market.

 

 

It’s a scene of disturbing noise and visual chaos, a snapshot of Myun-ga’s worldview and perhaps Gu-nam’s fate, as some dogs wildly lunge at one another, straining at their leashes, while others sit in cages, some presumably awaiting their culinary fate. Don’t think too hard about what the men later slurp from their bowls, but don’t freak out either: the only blood spilled is human.

 

 

And blood there is, gushing and splattering, in a story that combines Grand Guignol levels of sanguineous spectacle with raw realism. Amid all the spray, there are double-crosses, a clandestine trip to Seoul, an undertow of politics, a gang boss (Cho Seong-ha) and chases that are as spectacularly choreographed and sometimes as funny as those in a Looney Tunes cartoon.

 

 

Mr. Na, reunited with the cinematographer and editor who worked on his feature debut, “The Chaser,” makes this movie’s 157 minutes fly with scenes that alternately take their time and compress life histories into a few shots and words. When Gu-nam visits a relative, the family’s entire story — its hopes and crushing defeats — is telegraphed by the shabbiness of a room and an old man’s one-sentence apology.

 

 

 

THE YELLOW SEA

Opens on Friday in New York; Los Angeles; Dallas; Chicago; San Francisco; and Aiea, Hawaii.

 

 

Written and directed by Na Hong-jin; director of photography, Lee Sung-je; edited by Kim Sun-min; music by Jang Young-gyu; choreography by Yoo Sang-seob; production design by Lee Hwo-kyoung; costumes by Chae Kyung-hwa; produced by Han Sung-goo; released by Wellmade Star M and Popcorn Film. In Manhattan at the Village East, Second Avenue at 12th Street, East Village. In Korean, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes.

 

 

WITH: Ha Jung-woo (Gu-nam), Kim Yun-seok (Myun-ga) and Cho Seong-ha (Tae-won).

Despite the opening voice-over, Gu-nam doesn’t explain much. What happened between him and his wife surfaces gradually, mostly through flashbacks and bits of conversation, while his personality comes into focus through his deeds, some of which are seemingly absurd, as when he takes a food break from playing amateur assassin, stepping out to eat a hot dog on a stick.

Again and again, Mr. Na affirms Gu-nam’s humanity, showing a man hungry, cold and terminally alone, even as that humanity seems to drain away because of his bad choices and actions. In “The Yellow Sea” the kinetic filmmaking viscerally conveys the palpitating fear of the chase and the thrill of escape in a movie that suggests that — for all the miles Gu-nam racks up — for him there may be no exit.

 

 

“The Yellow Sea” is rated R. (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.) Extreme ax, knife and meat-bone violence.

 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

 

 

Correction: December 7, 2011

A listing of credits on Friday with a film review of “The Yellow Sea,” using information from a publicist, misstated the movie’s running time. It is 2 hours 16 minutes, not 2 hours 37 minutes.

 

 

A version of this review appeared in print on December 2, 2011,  on page C8 of the New York edition with the headline: The Blood Runs Freely, But the Dogs Can’t.

 

 

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/movies/the-yellow-sea-from-south-korea-review.html