Lee Chang-Dong Retrospective: Burning (2018)
Director: Lee Chang-dong Run Time: 148 min. Release Year: 2018
Starring: Choi Seung-ho, Jun Jong-seo, Kim Soo-kyung, Steven Yeun, Yoo Ah-in
Country: South Korea, Japan
Language: Korean, English
About the film:
Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
The searing examination of an alienated young man, Jongsu, a frustrated introvert whose already difficult life is complicated by the appearance of two people in his orbit: first, Haemi, a spirited woman who offers the romantic possibility, and Ben, a wealthy and sophisticated young man she returns from a trip with. However, when Jongsu learns of Ben’s mysterious hobby and Haemi suddenly disappears, his confusion and obsessions begin to mount, culminating in a stunning finale.
“This entire film is meticulously calibrated in its ambiguity, encouraging certain assumptions that neither the characters nor the audience can ever fully verify, so it’s best to be on one’s toes.”
—Peter Debruge, Variety
About the filmmaker:
Lee Chang-dong is a South Korean director, screenwriter, and novelist. When he was young, he hoped to become a painter, but he made a name for himself in the theater and literary worlds. Chang-dong did not get come into filmmaking until he was nearly 40, beginning his career as a screenwriter and assistant director for Park Kwang-su, a key figure of the Korean New Wave of the late 1980s and 1990s. He has written and directed only six features across more than twenty years, but these exquisite films have placed him among the most admired and respected auteurs in cinema.
A celebrated academic and novelist in South Korea whose fiction earned him accolades well before his foray into cinema, Lee writes and directs harrowing tales that place his characters in extreme psychological and physical agony to test the limits of the human spirit. An elderly woman at the onset of Alzheimer’s confronts her grandchild’s utter indifference to morality in Poetry (2010); a single mother endures a cascade of tragedies in Secret Sunshine (2007); a man suffers the forces of South Korea’s tumultuous history in Peppermint Candy (1999). His tightly structured plot lines deliver unflinching exposés of pain, trauma, and rage. He appears to follow conventional genre tropes, from melodrama to noir and gangster flicks, only to subvert audience expectations with exceptionally complex stories that leave them to contemplate perplexing existential, spiritual, and moral questions. Burning (2018), Chang-dong’s most recent film, is regarded as one of his strangest yet. The film premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize.
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