Director – Kim Soo-yong – 1967 – South Korea – 78m
****
A married man leaves Seoul to visit his dull hometown for a few days, where he embarks on a brief affair with a music teacher from the local school – 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
Yun Gi-jun (Shin Seong-il from The Barefooted Young, Kim Ki-duk, 1964) is bored with his job. He sits at his desk in a huge office looking at the paperwork, seeing it crawling with insects. But when others enter the office, they don’t see any of that, so it’s clearly all in his head. In many ways, that sets the scene for the mood of this heavily introspective piece which makes much use of voice over and flashback, as Gi-jun takes time out in his hometown of Mujin, for which he claims not to feel much affection but which is nevertheless full of personal history and memories for him.
We see him at home with his wife as she straightens his tie, and later as she brings her rich father over to the house. Gi-jin has married into a business, and his wife is very business-savvy. Perhaps he made the wrong choice. All he ever wanted to do growing up in Mujin was to get away from the place, and she would appear to have been his escape route. In retrospect, which he may have wanted to get out of Mujin, the marriage and job in Seoul in which he ended up may not be much better. Yet what alternative did he ever have?
His mother has long since died (we never hear anything about his father – perhaps he was killed during the war?) and one of the things he plans to do (and does) while he’s in Mujin is to visit her grave and pay his respects. Although she’s dead, she’s very much alive (played by actress Kim Shin-jae) in his memories, in part triggered by his being back in Mujin. He stays with an unnamed auntie (Ju Jung-neo), who he is surprised to learn never reads the papers. He catches up with old friends who stayed behind when he left, such as Park, who takes him over to the house of Cho Han-su (Lee Nak-hun), where a few old friends are getting together for a dinner party.
Yun was one of the two smartest students in his school year – Cho, who was the other, got himself a job in the local tax office and is now running the place. One woman is present at this gathering, a music teacher at the local school, Miss Ha In-suk (Yoon Jeong-hee from Poetry, Lee Chang-dong, 2010; A Swordsman in the Twilight, Chung Chang-wha, 1967). Park doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself too much and leaves early. The others stay on, and after an enjoyable evening, Yun finds himself walking with Miss Ha, who asks him to walk her home when their paths diverge and manoeuvres him into meeting up at the beach the next afternoon after her school shift.
The next day, after he has visited his mother’s grave, he meets with Miss Ha, and they walk and talk and then make love on the beach. She talks about coming with him to Seoul. He takes her to a hotel where he knows the aging proprietress, and introduces In-suk as his wife so they can share a room. Back at his aunt’s, he writes In-suk a love letter than tears it up. Summoned back to Seoul by his wife because an important business meeting is coming up, he can’t get the teacher out of his mind, vowing to bring her to Seoul as soon as he can extricate himself from his current life. He seems sincere, but it’s not clear how viable his plan is- perhaps he’s simply deceiving himself, and it won’t ever happen.
There are arguably two main characters here. The first is clearly Yun, saddled with all the baggage of both his past and his present, but the second is not so much Miss Ha, who is very definitely a secondary character, as the town of Mujiin itself. Yun’s voice-over talks about it in terms of not only small-mindedness and a place he couldn’t wait to leave, but also of the mist, or fog, that characterises the place, as if to keep its occupants thinking the same way they always have.
Visually, the fog is evident in Seok Jun-jang’s atmospheric cinematography, which at times lends the locations an almost otherworldly feel. (Not that any of the still images for the film represent this adequately, but you’ll certainly notice this if you sit down and watch it.) Not in the sense of horror or fantasy atmospherics, exactly, but there is something of the quality of a dream about all this, as Yun drifts in and out of the present day and his memories, sometimes even reliving moments of his recent past, such as his affair with In-suk, with the details playing back differently from the way we previously saw and experienced them.
There’s also something admirable about both the simplicity of the piece and its singularity of purpose. If you were to pin this down, you might call it a doomed romance, slice of life, drama. Or an essay on the way memories weave in and out of the present. Either way, there’s something quite compelling about it. The protagonist is trapped both in his marriage, which he willingly walked into but from which he now longs to escape, and in his small town past, which he thought he had left behind him. The teacher, too, is trapped in the ethereal town of mist, and longs for something better which might either be a trap or might never materialise if Yun lacks the guts to go through with it.
As often with Korean movies, there’s a refreshing frankness about all this. It’s like a version of Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) with the infamous British repression replaced with doom and gloom, yet for all that no less affecting.
Cast also includes Kim Jung-chul, Lee Bin-hwa, Bong Chu.
Mist 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.
Trailer (Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema):
LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival 2024 ran from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th at BFI Southbank and other venues.
Trailer (LKFF 2024):