Director – Yu Hyun-mok – 1961 – South Korea – 110m
****
Former soldiers and others struggle with the effects of post-war economic depression in the newly constituted South Korea – plays in Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank
Made and released in the brief period of about a year between the collapse of one dictatorship and the rise of another, and the temporary relaxation of state censorship that accompanied it in South Korea, Aimless Bullet deals with the struggle to survive in that country amidst economic collapse. Men including demobbed soldiers and officers struggle to find work, others lucky enough to have jobs struggle to support their extended networks of loved ones while women drift into prostitution – or, if they’re really lucky, become movie stars.
It opens with crippled, former officer Gyeong-sik, constantly asking Sgt. Park and other drinking buddies not to call him “The Commander”, making a scene in a bar and smashing a glass door. Wandering through the streets at night alone afterwards, he’s accosted by former girlfriend Song Myeong-suk (Seo Ae-ja) who desperately wants him to fulfil his promise and marry her, but he won’t because as a cripple he feel an incomplete man.
Myeong-suk meanwhile is prostituting herself to get by. One of her brothers Song Yeong-ho (Choi Mu-ryong from Woman of Fire, 1971, Kim Ki-young) is desperate to find work and looks to have struck lucky when ascendant movie actress Miss Goh gets him a starring part in a film. But when he learns that it’s about a soldier with wounds just like his, he turns the part down. He can’t afford to by his niece Hye-ok the new pair of shoes he’s repeatedly promised her, and the little girl has become accustomed to think of him as a liar. Things seem to be looking up when he meets Oh Seol-hui (Mun Hye-ran), formerly a woman lieutenant in the army, but their blossoming romance is cut short by tragic circumstances beyond their control. Frustrated, he decides to rob a bank – but then that goes wrong too.
His brother Song Cheol-ho (Kim Jin-kyu from Goreoyang, 1963; The Housemaid, 1960, both Kim Ki-young) suffers from toothache but is loath to spend the money to get it fixed. As well as his daughter Hye-ok he has a son who bunks off school to make money selling newspapers. His wife (Moon Jeong-suk, star of A Woman Judge, Hong Eun-won, 1962; The Devil’s Stairway, Lee Man-hee, 1964) is pregnant. He’s ground down by the daily drudge of working at Kim Seong-guk’s Accounting Office.
As the Commander and the woman lieutenant drop out of the plot to enable the narrative to focus on the two brothers, it lurches towards something like A Day Off (Lee Man-hee, 1968), part crime thriller and part noir angst in a world where any promise of a better life always has another, less pleasant side to it.
Perhaps this is best represented by the scene where, like the confused heroine of Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929) Cheol-ho’s feet walk the streets. His eyes pass shopfronts filled with consumer products he can’t afford before he succumbs to visiting a dentist (Choi Myeong-su) and paying for a tooth extraction. Even then, he’s told he can only have one wisdom tooth removed per visit, so that proves less than satisfactory. He slumps into a taxi but keeps changing his mind as to where he wants to go. He has become, as he describes himself, an aimless bullet. The film, by way of contrast, knows exactly what it’s aiming at, and in its final scenes hits its target – that of showing the human cost of economic depression – head on.
The film is also known as Stray Bullet, although given the script’s content Aimless Bullet seems a more apposite translation.
Aimless Bullet plays in Echoes in Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank.
It previously played in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival 2019, in my coverage of which this review was originally published in DMovies.org.
LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival 2024 runs from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th at BFI Southbank and other venues.