Korea’s violent history features many atrocities,
injustices, and infamous milestones but, aside from the separation of the
peninsula, none is more present in the national psyche than the awful Gwangju
massacre of 1980, in which students activists were mowed down by the military
at the behest of a paranoid and brutal authoritarian regime. 30 years later and it still features
prominently in film and television, cineastes can’t help but scratch the itch. It’s a little like Lady Macbeth’s
imagined blood stain which she can never rid herself
of, “out damned spot!” she often cries. Similarly, the Gwangju massacre is a
psychological trauma that’s here to stay.
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| The Busan family |
Clash of the Families, the second most successful Korean
film of the first quarter of 2011, holds no pretense of being a great
Shakespearean tragedy. Instead, it
owes a lot to the Bard’s great comedies, though it does begin as a variation
of his Romeo & Juliet. Here,
instead of the Montagues and the Capulets, the warring, disapproving factions
of the couple's families are caricatured emblems of the rival Jeolla and Busan
regions.
Gwangju is, of course, a major city in the Jeolla province,
and it still bears the mark of the massacre it suffered. Around the nation, natives of the area
are sometimes stigmatized because of it, though maybe not consciously. Similarly to this year’s
Sunny, the
protagonists from Jeolla are looked down upon by other characters, though they
exemplify a hardiness absent from the urbanites. In both films, strong women hid their Jeolla roots, since
they are seen as a source of shame.
Perhaps people would rather not be reminded of one of the country’s
lowest points, even more so for those that concealed their identities.
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| Who's the boss? |
Early on in the film we are introduced to the Jeolla
contingent of the narrative as they work in a regional nightclub. A group of young women sitting at a
table are harassed by some cocky military recruits who ask that they join
them. Despite being emphatically
rebuffed they continue to insist and become increasingly more physical, clearly
they believe there status in the military affords them the respect of women, traditionally lower down the pecking order. Conversely the men are so quickly
rejected that perhaps it symbolizes a latent wariness of the military in the
region as well as the progressive empowerment of women in recent times. In any case, the film’s
romantic lead, Hyeon-joon (Song Sae-byeok), who is tall, feminine, wiry, and far from dashing, intervenes
and when he announces that he was an officer in the marines, the soldiers
quickly become apologetic and obsequious.
He is a sign of a superior authority, despite his less than imposing
physique, and thus must be respected.
The women also begin to show an interest in him. Hyeon-joon is in fact not a marine but it
serves to demonstrate how Korea is still a country in which citizens fear
authority and frequently prostrate before it.
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| Lovebirds |
Clash of the Families begins with an innocent romance, Da-hong and Hyeon-joon are penpals who have fallen in love, they are very pure and
traditional. She is from a wealthy
family in Busan and he is somewhat poorer and from Jeolla. They meet in Seoul to go on dates and
finally decide that he should meet her parents, but he must pretend to be a
Seoulite. He goes over for a
weekend and meanwhile his father sends his brother to spy on him. Much of the action subsequently takes
place in Da-hong’s family home and Busan as Hyeon-joon must be careful to hide his
identity from Da-hong’s domineering father (Baek Yoon-shik), who despises Jeolla.
The film was very popular in Korea but foreign viewers will
likely have some trouble since a lot of the comedy arises from differences in
regional dialects and customs. I
would be curious to examine a breakdown of the box offices returns to see if it
was markedly more successful in the Busan and Jeolla regions.
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| Baek Yoon-shik as the father |
As can be expected from this kind of narrative, it is fairly
moralistic. The conclusions are
readily evident as the film plays through the habitual cornucopia of contrived
machinations, including: playing off of rivalry, role reversal, parallel
characters, misunderstandings, inopportune interruptions, hypocrisy, secret
identities, etc. A lot of hidden
identifies nevertheless come out before long. You can anticipate the ‘remaining true to yourself’ conclusion from a
mile off.
Melodrama lies at the heart of Clash of the Families and
despite never approaching subtlety and being populated by two-note characters,
the film manages to be engaging and somewhat endearing, even in its most
ridiculous scenes. Melodrama used
to be the most prominent genre in Korean cinema (it still is on TV) but some
say that it has fallen from grace.
I believe it is just as entrenched and important as it once was,
however, it has been repositioned.
No longer the main genre of most movies, it now serves as part of a
balancing act of generic devices.
I would also go as far as saying that it is the glue that holds it all
together.
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| The brilliant Kim Soo-mi |
A lot of Korean films will follow
a path recognizable to Western audiences until taking a huge detour into
melodrama. Clash of the Families follows
this same route: It goes through the three acts which you expect, culminating in a
large event where everything is revealed, but instead of quickly tying
everything up, it adds a full fourth act to gently thread the many loose
ends. As is usual for Korean
films, this “4th act” is a melodramatic departure. Perhaps a tough sell for uninitiated
foreign audiences, 4th acts seems very common these days in Korean
cinema, it’s like a repository for excess melodrama.
While sweet, the main couple
is nearly insufferable in their caricatured and cloying naivety. This was a tough pill for me to swallow at first but as I
warmed to the film and its colorful, albeit simply drawn, characters, enough
suspension of disbelief set in for me to enjoy the film. Baek Yoon-shik as the patriarch and Kim
Soo-mi as his wife are the standouts in the cast. They are very reliable comic
actors who manage to rein in some of the unbalanced performances of the younger
members of the cast.
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| Will he or won't he? |
The film derives
a lot of its laughs from scenes which are independent of the
narrative. This more or less worked
because the narrative itself can be at times superfluous, though I’m not sure
if this is a good or a bad thing.
My favorite part of the film was the inevitable scene where Hyeon-joon may or
may not confess his origin to Da-hong's father. They are on a fishing hut in the middle of a lake and the
fact that Hyeon-joon can’t swim comes up in discussion. You know he is debating whether to come clean but the
father’s strictness and the surrounding body of water add a nice tension to the
scene. It may not sound like much
but it’s little moments like this that allow Clash of the Families to rise
above the sum of its less than appealing parts.
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