Director – Park Chul-soo – 1995 – South Korea – 98m
*****
Free to view in the Korean Film Archive as part of
Korean Film Nights Online: Trapped! The Cinema of Confinement
(Friday, July 17th – Thursday, August 27th)
Apartment New Hope Bio. A residential block of flats for the well off. Nice if you can afford it. Two rooms on each floor. The two rooms on the third floor are numbers 301 and 302.
301 has a designer-built kitchen. Perfect for newly moved-in Songhui (Pang Eun-jin) who lives for food preparation and cooking. She spends a lot of time in food markets sourcing the best ingredients. She has a collection of attractive and distinctive coloured plates because, after all, the way you serve food is important and can make all the difference.
Songhui is curious about her neighbour in 302, but Yunhui (Hwang Sin-hye) wants to keep herself to herself. Songhui will watch through her door’s spyhole and when Yunhui appears will dash out to say “hi”. If Yunhui possibly can, she will get in to 302 and close the door before Songhui can catch her.
Actually, Yunhui is curious too. At least enough so to spy through her own front door on prospective residents being shown around 301 by the estate agent in a flashback. The film uses a lot of these – you get quite used to moving around in time.
What food and cooking is to Songhui, books and writing are to Yunhui. She writes a monthly food and diet column for a magazine. A lengthy article about sex is glimpsed on her desktop computer. She often receives messages on her answering machine which she mostly hides behind rather than answers. She occasionally sits and reads. Despite her numerous and meticulously filled bookshelves, Yunhui doesn’t seem to read that often. Instead, she spends most of her time writing.
Songhui starts cooking meals for Yunhui. Eveything Songhui creates in her kitchen looks delicious. Songhui starts turning up uninvited at Yunhui-s door, plate with mail in hand. Yunhui takes the food out of politeness. As soon as she’s got rid of Songhui, however, the food goes straight into Yunhui’s bin. We never see her eat. She frequently has to rush into the lavatory to throw up, but try as she might, she can never bring up any food, presumably because she doesn’t eat so there’s nothing there TO throw up.
Songhui runs into Yunhui as the latter is taking out her rubbish. Which consists of four meals lovingly prepared by Songhui. In a small, transparent, household bin liner. Clearly visible (although Yunhui hides the bag behind her at first). But then instead of letting Yunhui take her rubbish out, Songhui forces her to eat it. Only Yunhui can’t.
At the film’s opening an investigator (Kim Chu-ryun) turns up to question Songhui about her missing neighbour and Songhui dismisses Yunhui as having no interest in either food or sex – as if those were the only two elements in life that mattered. Another flashback: Songhui enjoys sex during at least the early stages of her marriage, but her obsession with cooking perfect meals for her husband and her constant need to be told how delicious her efforts were eventually take their toll.
As their sex life grinds to a resultant halt, Songhui starts binge eating to compensate. In fact, you could say she binge eats and binge cooks. Her bizarre culinary attention-seeking reaches its apogee when she prepares the last meal she’ll ever cook for her husband – with the couple’s pet dog as the main ingredient.
Yunhui’s very different past is to prove no less traumatic. Her mother and stepfather ran a butcher’s shop where her mother was obsessed with making money from food sales while her stepfather molested and raped the teenage Yunhui on a regular basis. A separate, tragic incident involved a customer’s little girl to whom Yunhui mentioned the game of hide and seek innocently playing that game. The girl accidentally locked herself in the deep freeze meat locker. Hours later, she was found as a frozen corpse by Yunhui.
Neither woman is in a good place to start with and as the outgoing Songhui tries to reach out to the defensive and self-isolating Yunhui, events turn from bad to worse.
This extraordinary film had an outing in the London Film Festival in the mid-nineties (I remember sitting in the huge auditorium of NFT1 watching it with maybe a handful of other people present) then inexplicably vanished without a trace here, despite winning a handful of South Korean awards and being chosen as that country’s entry in Hollywood’s 1995/6 Academy Awards. It has considerable staying power – its basic premise has stayed with me over the years and the film remains as potent now as it did back in the day (even if Yunhui’s huge early nineties mobile phone dates it).
The psychopathology of Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996) meets the culinary sensibilities of Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994) as the two women’s separate attempts to lead a normal life are thwarted by their traumatic personal histories, a narrative visually mitigated by Songhui’s constant output of mouthwatering meals. These latter place the film alongside such further food porn genre classics as Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985), Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987), The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra, 2013) and South Korea’s own Little Forest (Yim Soon-Rye, 2018).
Like Crash, though, it’s a much darker vision than these other food movies. Park Chul-soo here appears to be fascinated by traumatised women, what makes them tick and how they relate to / impinge on others. His sensibility recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s traumatising his heroines as a means to teasing out a good story.
Although the narrative delves into the personal histories of both women via flashbacks involving Songhui’s husband and Yunhui’s parents, the piece is essentially a two-hander with most of the action taking place within the two eponymous flats and the hallway between them.
A quarter of a century on, it remains a work of great potency which deserves to be widely seen. Kudos to the Korean Film Archive for making it available to view.
(One minor quibble. While the picture looks in perfect condition, there’s an awful lot of crackle on parts of the soundtrack. I would love to see (hear) a restoration of 301/302 with the sound cleaned up.)
301/302 is available free to view in the UK in the Korean Film Archive as part of
Korean Film Nights Online: Trapped! The Cinema of Confinement
(Friday, July 17th – Thursday, August 27th)
Trailer:
Intro:
Movie:
Korean Film Nights Online: Trapped! The Cinema of Confinement will be hosted on the koreanfilm website as well as the KCCUK YouTube channel. The recorded introductions will be live at 7pm in a playlist followed by each film, from the Korean Film Archive channel. More info here. http://koreanfilm.co.uk/news/trapped-the-cinema-of-confinement
17/07 – 301 302. Park Chul-Soo (1995) 98m.
30/07 – Eunuch. Shin Sang-Ok (1968) 95m.
13/08 – Transgression. Kim Ki-young (1974) 111m.
27/08 – Sopyonje. Im Kwon-Taek (1993) 113m.