The last time I saw Li Cangdong's work was 2000's "Poems", a film that shows the lust of the elderly and the self-reflection of life at the end of life and the compromise of tolerance for reality.
At the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, he presented the insurmountable sociological film poem "Burning".
Li Cangdong, who has a very high literary attainment, has a master-level stable level in both the film's lines and picture scheduling. This decades of steady output comes from his self-imposed rigor, and his films are pitifully small, but each one is a classic.
It is no exaggeration to say that Lee Cang-dong is a rare, even unique, authorial director in the Korean film industry and in the history of world cinema.
This year, the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda won the Best Film in Cannes with "Thief Family", and the high-profile "Burning" failed, but the world media praised "Burning".
A large number of tasteful media and film critics have given unprecedented and perfect evaluations.
If Kore-eda's films hide a dark fire in a calm, then Lee Cangdong's films release a scorching fire in a highly restrained and beautiful picture.
Like this Burning,
The whole film is 140 minutes, he spends 130 minutes, adding accessories and firewood, maintaining rationality and distance in the constantly low, depressing narrative, only in the last 5 minutes of the whole film, throwing out Mars, burning everything, destroying life and existence, reason and humanity, and poking the bones and ashes.
In order to finally "seal the throat with a sword", the fat brother will minimize spoilers and add fuel to the "burning" from the macro level.
The main story of the film is not surprising, but it is simple enough.
Soo, a graduate of the Faculty of Literature, survives in the city by physical exertion, unexpectedly meeting Emi, a fellow countrywoman when she was a child.
Emi is proactive and intelligent, and soon has a relationship with Zongxiu that goes beyond friendship.
However, after this intimate contact, the relationship between the two became confusing and entangled due to the intervention of the mysterious man Ben.
The material conditions are enough to crush the relationship between Soo-soo's Ben and Emi by leaps and bounds, but they always maintain a relationship with So-soo.
Until Hyemi suddenly disappears and the human world evaporates, Zongxiu begins to question Ben's identity and begins to adjust Emi's whereabouts, causing him and Ben's fate to lead to a creepy, fateful ending that cannot be turned back.
"Burning" is actually adapted from the novel "Burning Warehouse" by the famous Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, and readers familiar with Haruki Murakami know that because his novel is different from the conventional literary attributes in terms of narrative structure and character description, his novel is often unsatisfactory when converted from text to image, and even because of the limitation of image capacity, the theme of the film and the novel are thousands of miles apart.
Recently adapted into films from the mainland and Japan, "Relief Grocery Store" has always appeared to be insufficient in the face of novels, almost overwhelmed by successful novel texts, without any novelty, and even the lines can only be copied from the novel.
However, Li Cangdong, who has a deep literary attainment, has made a drastic adaptation and filling in of Haruki Murakami's novel.
"Burning Warehouse" is only a short story, and the amount of content cannot support the 140-minute long film text. Li Cangdong not only modified the character archetype, but also added lines that were close to more than 80% of the novel. What is even more surprising is that the lines he wrote actually maintained the writing style and sentence breaking habits of Haruki Murakami in the English version.
From the English version of the film's lines, the audience can clearly see Li Cangdong's profound literary accomplishment.
Even fans of Haruki Murakami lament that this adaptation may go beyond the novel itself, with a broader sociological career and extraordinary human insight.
Because of Lee Cangdong, Haruki Murakami's novel lost to the film adaptation for the first time.
There are many scenes in the film where the imagery is far-reaching, the metaphor is extremely deep, and the cinematic language is used to the extreme.
The scene where the heroine Emi dances drunk and naked under the sunset on the farm is definitely the most poetic cinematic narrative text of the year, just a solo dance but full of rich text layers, the camera is lighted by silhouettes, the sunset and the lonely girl form a strong intertextuality, the jazz music in the background suddenly stops, and the cows in the greenhouse interrupt the daydreaming, pulling the characters back to the reality of not being able to look directly.
Combined with the first and last two acts of this fragment, you will find that the master film can actually be intertextual and superimposed between the texts, and continue to expand on the horizontal and vertical coordinate systems of the narrative, resonating to resonance.
Due to the textual connotation of the narrative and the beautiful poetry of the picture scheduling, when watching "Burning", it is difficult for you to perceive the passage of time, the story conflict is not a Hollywood-style link after another, it has the reading inertia when reading the novel, once you enter the text, you will be attracted by the text and the paragraph itself.
As the page number rises and the paper thickness thins, you can predict that the story is coming to an end;
But when watching "Burning", you who are caught in the whirlpool of the story have always been attracted to the ending, but you can't predict when it will come.
Because "Burning" has done enough articles on the "virtual", it completely tears apart the imagination and reality, you are difficult to distinguish what is the truth, what is the lie, and in the end, you can only believe what you trust, and keep your self-values projected in the film, so as not to affect the individual's judgment of the real society and cause psychological imbalance.
And you who penetrate the image text and pierce the cloak of fiction will prefer to believe that lies come true and reality is false, because the truth is tragic and too cruel.
In the film, "Burning" mentions a writer Faulkner many times, which is the most beloved literary idol of the male protagonist Zongxiu in the film.
He even said, "Reading his novels is like seeing your own experience."
William Faulkner is one of the most influential writers in the history of American literature and a representative of stream-of-consciousness literature in the United States.
Through subjective refraction, Faulkner uses the novel to see through the reality of the American Southern society facing the invasion of industrial civilization (the American South was in a plantation-farming society at that time). His plot is immersed in the complex psychological changes of the characters, and the delicate emotional descriptions are interspersed.
Faulkner's attitude toward suffering is "boiling."
And "Burning" is obviously a young Korean, in a long period of continuous suffering, a devastating outbreak.
But Li Cangdong, who is good at "hiding", did not sell bitterness and complain, but calmly and coldly used narrative to show the contradictions and gaps between social classes.
"Burning" is not only poetic, it is also realistic, not only literary, but also social.
Hyemi and Zongxiu belong to the lower class, while Ben is The "Gatsby" of South Korea, who treats travel as a life, can cook pasta in a leisurely mansion, and drive a Porsche to the gym at night.
Li Cangdong does not have a large-scale exaggeration of the existence of class divisions, but always allows you to inadvertently perceive the difference between the two.
The audience can see the hint from Zong Xiu's embarrassed, frozen expression and panicked reaction.
Ben in the film is always polite, friendly, and indifferent, but it is his attitude of not caring about life, understated talk, and his so-called proof of life, so that the audience can clearly distinguish the class attributes between the characters.
But the class divide is not the ultimate flame that "burns", but at best the fuel that is buried.
In the second half of the story, the genre of "Burning" has changed, adding Hitchcock-style suspense and thriller elements, and after careful tasting, the audience will find that all the suspense and puzzles are actually buried in the form of "hiding" in the first half of the film.
In the first scene of the film, when Emi and Zongxiu meet for the first time to drink, Hyemi performs a "pantomime" for Zongxiu, a spiritual act that relies entirely on imagination and transcends reality to satisfy the heart.
At this moment, Li Cangdong released a "virtual" smoke bomb.
Then, the cat that existed, the hometown dry well that Emi kept mentioning,
Also, the dishes and "offerings" mentioned in this cooking, the plastic greenhouse that must be burned once every two months, the women's makeup box placed in the home, and the women's watch that appears last,
They all become the "McCophine" in the narrative of "Burning"—the key items that are derived from the conflict that drives the plot forward and is insignificant to the audience.
The constant "hiding" leads the story and the fate of the characters to a fatalistic ending in a charged way, Li Cangdong's story is full of paper, and the three protagonists all prove the core value of existentialism in a self-destructive way.
Three young people who are plagued by loneliness and social repression finally complete each other, bringing the inexplicable philosophical issue of "survival or destruction" from the film into reality, giving people a strong shock, and then abruptly stopping, leaving a valuable distance and space between the audience and the screen, text and thinking.
After persuasing history and religion, and paying attention to marginalized people such as the elderly and cerebral palsy, he used "Burning" to depict for us the reactions of young people after there is no way out and no hope.
The terrible thing is that both men and women, the upper classes and the lower classes of commoners, are caught in the dilemma of collective decadence, empty boredom, perverted search for self-existence.
Li Cangdong, who is both a philosopher and a poet, brings the burning fire in the film to your heart and me with master-level control, and brings it into the reality that seems to be lively but is actually alienated.
Li Cangdong showed the desolate interior of "Burning" as early as the first act,
That was The first time Zongxiu had a relationship with Emi.
Previously, Emi said that this damp room can only shine in the sun for a few minutes a day, because it is too short, so it is doubly cherished.
When the two lonely hearts merged together, the sunlight left a narrow projection on the wall of the hut, and Zong Xiu twisted his body desperately and looked up at the shrinking sunlight.
Li Cangdong kindly lengthened this moment, did not show the disappearance of light and shadow, and switched scenes, he chose to keep the precious moment of light, hoping that it would withstand the coming, longer darkness.