Recent years of Korean films have been filled with stories of darkness, murder, depravity and perversion, such as Kim Ji-woon's "I Saw the Devil", Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite", which won the Cannes Palme d'Or, and so on. While these films vary in degree of "realism," they all have an air of icyness. Apparently, Hwang Dong-hyuk's "The Melting Pot" also uses this dark tone, but his film is about real human monsters, not ordinary psychopaths.
"The Melting Pot" tells viewers about the corruption of the entire Korean bureaucracy and the indifference of society through the story of a new teacher exposing sexual abuse in a school for the deaf and dumb. The film is based on a novel of the same name written by Kong Zhiyong, based on real events at a school for the deaf and disabled in Gwangju that came to light in 2005.
Maybe you heard about these things happening to children from the media before, but when the facts are displayed on the screen, we lament the injustice of society and ask ourselves: How can people do such terrible things? Will this really happen in our society? How should innocent and vulnerable people in society be protected? As depicted in the film, it attracted widespread attention at the time, and the heinous crime was later tried. But this is not the end of the story, and the scars left on society as a whole are not easy to heal, but we still have to ask: will similar cases happen around us?
The film begins a bit like a horror movie, where Kang In-ho, who has lost his wife, leaves his young daughter in Seoul to live with his old mother. He drove to the remote town of Kiritsu, where he found a job with the help of his teacher. Along the way, Ren Hao drives in bad weather while a little boy stands by the tunnel. In an instant, we saw the speeding train crash into the boy, and Ren Hao's car also hit a deer.
When he arrived at the school, an ominous omen came over him. The children stared at him suspiciously, unresponsive to his friendly appearance. After meeting the principal and his twin brothers, as well as the director of teaching, Mr. Park, the other party asked him to pay a large sum of money as a "school development fund" as a reward for his job. But he had to pay medical treatment to his own daughter financially, so he had to borrow the money from his old mother, and when he went to hand it over, he found that the principal was paying bribes to the local policeman, Jiang Criminal Police.
Then, as he was about to leave school that night, he heard a child crying in fear, and it was in the women's restroom. But the school guard stopped him from entering, saying that "the children here often make strange noises for fun.".
Next, he saw that the faces of the children were bruised and swollen, and in the teachers' lounge, he saw Mr. Park viciously beating a student, Jeon Myung-so (at first, his brother was abused and chose to commit suicide on the railway), while his colleagues took care of themselves and quietly did their work. The atmosphere of threat and fear escalated until Ren-ho was eventually taken to the laundry room in the basement by the girl Chen Yuli, where he found a woman stuffing another girl's head into the washing machine. The angry woman told Ren Hao that as a supervisor, her duty was to discipline her children. The collapsed Ren Hao rushed to the hospital with the girl Jin Yeon-doo. It was there, with the help of a young social worker, Xu Youzhen, that a camera was found. Ren Hao opens up the girl, revealing that she and the other students are victims of abuse.
At this point, the film is transformed into a legal thriller, and Ren Hao and Xu Youzhen try to ask the authorities to deal with what happened at the school. What they think is so natural, but wherever they go, they will encounter resistance. Corrupt police said they had no jurisdiction, and the municipal authorities overseeing the schools claimed it had nothing to do with them because abuses and attacks could occur outside the school.
When Ren Hao and Xu Youzhen made their evidence public, the police had no choice but to arrest the criminals, but the legal system itself was unfavorable to the case. The alleged abuser turned out to be enjoying the honor of society and being a respected member of the church. No one wants to help the distressed and desperate children, even if the details of the case are irrefutable.
One of the most surprising developments in the case concerns the legal actions taken by the abuser to get out of responsibility: South Korean law provides that when a child under the age of 13 is sexually assaulted, the abuser can "forgive" his crime if he pays the child's parents or guardians. There is also the absurd and unfair system of "courtesy for former officials". Even though the evidence piled up, Ren Hao and Xu Youzhen saw that the case was out of control, and the perpetrators not only did not go to jail, but the punishment was very light. This caused many South Koreans to lose confidence in the law, especially When Myung-so learned that the other party had bribed his grandmother, he chose to die with Mr. Park.
Director Hwang Dong Hyuk presents the narrative in a straightforward "realist" way, triggering an angry emotional reaction of the audience through the details of the case. In the face of legal inequality and the corruption inherent in the bureaucracy, Ren Hao and Xu Youzhen appear to be weak, they have tried, but they have been shattered by reality, but they also let the whole incident be revealed, causing the whole Korean society to shake. For the male and female protagonists of the film, the whole society is a melting pot, as Xu Youzhen said, "We have done all this, not to change the world, but not to let the world change us!" When Ren Hao's old mother asked him to give up thinking more about his own daughter, if he really kept silent about crime, he would be "melted" and would "not know how to be a father."
The film's straightforward depictions of themes and abuse make The Melting Pot a "can't bear to look at it" film, and for the most part, the director avoids the glitz of some of the other recent Korean thrillers, relying instead on the basis of the story to generate dramatic tension. In a feature story, director Hwang Dong-hyuk said his only purpose was to convey his anger when he first heard about the case through the film.
The film's director is highly efficient, the cast is strong, and the acting skills are superb, especially since the protagonists of the story are three children. When it was released in South Korea in the fall of 2011, the film was not only a huge success, but it sparked outrage across the country, leading the ruling party to launch an investigation into the "political activities" of writer Kong Zhiyong. But the public reaction was swift to prompt the government to amend existing laws related to child sexual abuse, in which at least one offender was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison and the absurd system of "courtesy for former officials" was abolished.
The movie "The Melting Pot" can even be said to have changed South Korea, as we all know, South Korea is a country heavily controlled by big bureaucrats and big enterprises, and the state apparatus has been seriously eroded by corruption, and the film profoundly exposes this, and then promotes the progress of subsequent events such as "Park Geun-hye", which is really in response to the sentence "Justice may be late, but it will never be absent!"