The intimate apocalypse

This is the way the world ends, not with an asteroid or waves of contagion, but with an aborted cab ride. At least that’s how it ended in South Korea in 2010, when writer/director/editor Jo Sung-hee made his impressive feature debut with End of Animal, a hugely resourceful, super fucking weird chamber disaster drama. The film got less play on the festival circuit than it should have, though its reputation did grease the wheels for Jo’s solid, if less inventive, 2012 follow-up A Werewolf Boy. It was released on DVD earlier this year. I finally caught up with it last week. 

A very pregnant young woman, Sun-yeong (Lee Min-Ji), is traveling by taxi from Seoul to her mother’s home somewhere in the countryside, where she plans to give birth. Somewhere en route, in the middle of nowhere, the cabbie stops for some regular-looking dude in a parka and ball cap—turns out he’s going the same way. But once said dude climbs in, things get tense. He’s touchy, and keeps ordering Sun-yeong not to stare at him, even though she’s in the back seat.  He starts announcing the number of seconds to go… until what? Then he says he has no cash or cards to pay. Then he starts to make uncanny guesses about numerous aspects of the personal lives of the cabbie and Sun-yeong. Then he starts talking angels with fangs and global blackouts. He then tells cabbie and Sun-yeong that he loves them, just before a flash of light startles everyone and knocks Sun-yeong unconscious.

When she wakes up: no cabbie, no touchy, psychic stranger. Just her and her unborn child in that seemingly endless desolate landscape. No mobile service. No nothing. She starts to search for a rest area that’s meant to be nearby. She’s starving. She finds an insolent kid in an abandoned house. She badly injures her foot. She meets a bickering couple. She’s aided by a goofy guy in track pants riding a bike—never trust a man in track pants. She nearly gets raped. Once in a while she gets instructions from the psychic stranger via radio signals—he’s the only thing on the air. At times, from across the wintry plain, she hears some sort of growling, freaky and hard to identify. Is this unseen animal going to be the end of her?

Despite the sweeping nature of the premise, Jo knows he’s not making a spectacle film of any sort. His camera most often sticks very close to his characters, often to just head and shoulders. Occasionally we get a wider view of the landscape. End of Animal is an intimate apocalypse. This is its novelty and strength as well as the source of its failings—which should not deter the intrigued from seeing it. It’s just that, however sympathetic her position may be, Sun-yeong winds up grating on you a bit. She’s having a rough time of it, and she whimpers, cries and screams an awful lot. End of Animal is at once fascinating and annoying. It’s probably too long, but it’s also a hell of a strange world to visit, one on its last legs, or simply waiting for something new.   

         

Uprooted and abandoned: Treeless Mountain

Moving from city to village to countryside, from a wearied mother to a neglectful aunt to an elderly grandparent, Jin and Bin (Hee Yeon Kim, Song Hee Kim) cultivate an impressive itinerary for a couple of sisters aged six and four respectively. Having already been abandoned by one parent, Jin and Bin are uprooted from their Seoul home and taken to live with their “Big Auntie” so that their mother can search for their errant father. When not drunk or inexplicably absent Big Auntie can be found extorting money from neighbours or occasionally throwing together a not very nutritious looking meal. The sisters take to roasting grasshoppers alive and selling them on the street, the money earned intended not for filling their rumbling bellies but rather the piggy bank given to them by mom just before her departure. By the time it’s filled, she tells them, I’ll be back. The girls take this promise at face value and receive their first lesson in how our parents bullshit us. Their journey features passages so desperate as to make your head spin, yet by the end of Treeless Mountain we’re left not with a sense of despair over the cruelty and indifference of the world but rather one of confidence in the inherent resilience of children.

This gradual sense of consolation arises partially from Korean-American writer/director So Yong Kim’s carefully modulated script, and partially, and perhaps more significantly, from her willingness to let her child actors frequently take the lead. Kim’s second feature opens with a series of close-ups of Jin, listening to her teacher at school, going home to retrieve Bin from a neighbour, having supper, being scolded by her mother. As Kim explains during an interview featured on Oscilloscope’s new DVD, close-ups became the master shots while making Treeless Mountain, so that scene after scene had to be constructed to an unusual degree from images of the children’s faces fully immersed in the act of trying to understand what’s going on. If you know something about how movies are made such a strategy might seem like a gamble, but it plays out here as a very sound approach to telling a story centering on kids. The camera stays close so as to register the slightest transition, and it typically does so from the height of the kids themselves. Just as the movie doesn’t concern itself with plot points the kids wouldn’t have access to, so does it evoke something of their perspective. This surrendering to the experience of its characters and the untutored contributions of its actors is what makes Treeless Mountain memorable.

Kim’s willingness to observe rather than impose is also in keeping with the tenants of neorealism, and Treeless Mountain can certainly be regarded as a noble entry into the genre. It not only features kids in trouble—a neorealist staple—but also spends a good third of its running time monitoring its characters as they single-mindedly try to perform a simple task. You could argue that the relatively early fulfillment of this task—the girls manage to fill the piggy bank a good half-hour before the end—is a major flaw in the movie’s construction, letting the air out of the whole thing so that it just sort of drifts toward finale. But the lack of dramatic escalation is one of the things that actually make Treeless Mountain absorbing. The narrative is as unanchored as its characters. The shape of the movie feels right for the content. And there’s never really a dull moment. Hee Yong and Song Hee are extremely cute and also captivating in their train of discoveries, and their director’s judicious use of Ozu-like intermediary scenes—a sky bisected by power lines becomes a motif—endow the whole with a sense of even pacing and a unified aesthetic.

Oscilloscope’s disc is handsomely packaged, though some of the extras are insubstantial. The audio commentary from Kim and producer Bradley Rust Gray feels unprepared for, with the pair prompting each other to say something to fill the gaps. Better is the Q&A presided over by Kim after a screening at New York’s Film Forum. She discusses the casting—Hee Yong was found at her elementary school, Song Hee at an orphanage—and her technique to working with them. Despite the uniformity of last names the writer/director and her actors are none related to the other, yet there is a sense here of an artist’s refamiliarizing herself with her roots. Having been transplanted to the US at the age of 12, Kim lives in Brooklyn and made Treeless Mountain under the auspices of the Sundance Institute. But the village where much of the movie was shot was the same one where Kim grew up, and, having spent so much of her life abroad, her spoken Korean is actually less proficient that that of Hee Yong’s. So perhaps the conditions under which the movie was made formed a sort of equalizer—language has a great way of demolishing hierarchy. In any case it’s always a pleasure to see a movie about kids where the adults filing them aren’t always looking down.

War, torture, and the limits of control: Man Hunt, Time Limit on DVD

The story was already in circulation, how in 1934 Fritz Lang was summoned to a meeting with Joseph Goebbels where he was offered the position of Führer of the German film industry; how Lang, whose Jewish heritage Goebbels presumably wasn’t aware of, whose ex-wife, screenwriter and actress Thea von Harbou, had already joined the Nazi party, then fled Germany immediately with nothing but the clothes on his back. The story’s so perfectly in keeping with the pursuit narratives Lang favoured. Its likely at least partially apocryphal, but anyway makes a hell of a great set-up for Man Hunt (1941), the thriller Lang made for Fox, newly available on DVD, that opens with Walter Pidgeon lining Hitler up in his sights on the cusp of World War II. Like Powell-Pressburger’s 49th Parallel (41), Man Hunt was a rallying cry for Americans to enter the war, and it was that much more persuasive for being helmed by this visionary Viennese director who had abandoned a dazzling career in the very country he was urging his new homeland to attack.

Based on Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male (39), the film concerns big game hunter Alan Thorndike (Pidgeon), captured by SS guards after being found perched on a cliff near Hitler’s Obersalzberg home with rifle in hand. When Thorndike eventually escapes, Hitler’s Security Commander (George Sanders) relentlessly pursues him as he returns clandestinely to England, determined to get Thorndike’s signature on a statement claiming the British government ordered the assassination. Yet not only was Thorndike not given any such instructions, he wasn’t actually trying to kill Hitler at all. The rifle wasn’t even loaded. A proud sportsman, Thorndike just wanted to know if he could do it. So Man Hunt becomes the story of how one man comes to understand the Nazi threat, takes responsibility, and returns to the hunt with guns now loaded.

There are some distractions, especially with accents. Pidgeon, the Brit who sounds suspiciously Canadian, and Sanders, the German who sounds suspiciously English, actually fair better than Joan Bennett’s thinly veiled London prostitute. She’s the only one to bother attempting an accent appropriate to her character, though her broad Cockney grates like a rusty lawnmower. Fortunately she’s still lovely, sensual and sassy in spite of her character’s poutiness, and has some touching scenes with Pidgeon, who treats her more like a niece that the lover she wants to become. But Lang’s exemplary staging and camerawork is finally the reason to see Man Hunt: his beautifully rendered inserts; his exquisite use of silence and shadow; his subtle motifs, such as Pidgeon’s forest footprints echoed later by marks left on a floor by his feet when dragged out of a Nazi torture chamber; his haunting compositions, such as those involving water and night especially, or the tree-enveloped deep-focus scene that plays out in a single shot with Pidgeon stumbling away from the Nazis who hunt him through the dense Obersalzberg wilderness.

Moving ahead in time to reflect on America’s involvement in Korea and, indirectly, Hollywood’s ensnarement in the red scare, Time Limit (57) is another allegory involving responsibility, torture and the limits of patriotism. It concerns a former POW accused of collaboration with the communists whose refusal to defend himself prompts a conscientious military investigator to look deeper into his case. The title refers both to the pressure placed on the investigator to speed the ostensibly open and shut case along, and to the psychological limits upon which even the most formidable soldier breaks down and becomes malleable to the enemies’ dictates. The film came out during a time when brainwashing was an increasing concern, one that fed directly into the ideological paranoia of the Cold War.

Time Limit was the only film ever directed by character actor Karl Malden, who took on the project at the suggestion of the film’s star and producer Richard Widmark. Malden had by then firmly established himself as one of Hollywood’s most dependable talents, and his reputation is reflected in the pedigree of his collaborators. Besides the inimitable Widmark, who plays the investigator, the film also features excellent turns from Dolores Michaels as a stenographer who manages to be both sexy and smarter than most of her superiors, a very young Rip Torn in his first credited film role, a very vulnerable Richard Basehart as the guilt-ridden POW, and Martin Balsam, who as a desk Sergeant bullying Widmark to court-martial Basehart and get it over with, embodies the virtual flipside of the character he played that same year in 12 Angry Men. Cinematographer Sam Leavitt, who often worked for Otto Preminger, was behind the camera, which shifts seamlessly between the actors, who are the utter focus of Malden’s clean, crisp approach.

MGM’s DVD’s not great. The aspect ratio’s been reformatted and there isn’t even a menu. But the transfer looks sharp enough and the film itself is sleek and engrossing. It also speaks very much to this mentality that’s loomed over us these last several years, one that says treason is so heinous a crime that mere accusations equal culpability, while ignoring the fact that love of God and country is not itself enough to withstand the frailties of our minds when driven to their outermost limits.