Children… opens with a young boy running in slow motion in a red cape in rural Korea in the early 1990s, accompanied by stirring music, a Korean Mendelssohn-esque string symphony. Right from the bat this is an emotional affair, the kind of scene that Korean filmmakers are so adept at. They can wring out feelings from their spectators without even presenting a story or real characters. All they need are a few symbolic images and some top-flight mise-en-scene and we are powerless to resist. The next few minutes quickly set the scene for something ominous to happen, once again without giving us any real information. The cinematography and exceptional score do all the work and give us everything we need to know.
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| Opening shot |
I went into this film not knowing a thing about it but it
was easy to tell where it was going from those opening moments before the title
shot. I was reminded of
Friend (2001) and
Memories of Murder (2003) in equal
measure. Naturally I grew very excited and eagerly followed the plot as a group
of children go missing and are not found. A few years later a shamed TV producer (Park Yong-woo) comes to the town and starts his own investigation in order to rebuild his
reputation. He enlists the help a professor (Ryoo Seung-yong) with a few crazy ideas but
encounters the resistance of the local law enforcement. The narrative doesn’t
quite follow where you think it will after that but I will let you discover
that for yourself.
The music in this film was truly extraordinary, not just in
its quality but also in its power when combined with the visual medium. This
brings me to an interesting question: how is it that from time to time we can
experience a potent degree of catharsis without having followed a narrative or
any character’s trajectory? Children… successfully raised a lump in my throat
and made me feel something before I even knew any of the character’s names.
Sadly the film did not ultimately follow through on this as I felt it was rife
with problems, and yet at numerous points during the film I found myself
affected by the evocative music and impressive technical skill on display.
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| Park Yong-woo as the TV producer |
Music is used in cinema (and television) to heighten the
emotions of a certain scene. The best examples of this are the short staccato
and loud spikes in horror, the sweeping strings in melodrama, and the bombastic
orchestral pieces used in epics, war, and action films. There are numerous
other examples but those three display their effectiveness and their potential.
Music can lift a dull scene, get the heart racing, or unscrew the valve to your
tear ducts, but it isn’t often that it will completely hijack your state of
mind irrespective of what is on screen. It does happen of course, there are
certain pieces of music that are so well-known and beautiful that they will
always prompt a strong reaction. Good examples are the second movement of Beethoven’s
7th symphony and Debussy’s Claire de lune, both overused at this point but
it’s easy to see why. On a purely subjective level each and every one of us may
react differently to individual pieces, it’s extraordinary how one piece of
music may change your perception of a film.
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| Ryoo Seung-yong as the professor |
Korean films often have excellent scores, I’m sure that
there are a handful of composers that are at the heart of this but I couldn’t
tell you who they are. Children… started to lose me, especially in the second
half but every times they broke out the strings I was helpless, captivated, but
by what and why? Let’s go back to the opening scene and examine it, music,
slow-mo, boy running in red cape, 20 years ago. The little information at hand
is actually crucial and as much as this scene may elicit an emotional response
from a foreign viewer, I imagine it must be even more so for a Korean. The red
cape brings to mind the bloody Gwangju massacre of 1980, in which thousands of
students dressed in red were slaughtered by the military government for
protesting. The dinky village roads and muted colors (save for the red) evoke
the still recent past of a country which has suffered an enormous amount of
trauma. What’s impressive is that I think the scene is still powerful even if
you are not privy to that information.
As for the rest of the film, there are a number of
interesting themes that are presented. There is the process of grief in Korea,
which is shown in a manipulative and rather ham-fisted way and includes themes
of the role of the parent and sacrifice. Then there is a veiled commentary on
the passage of time in modern Korean society as the disappearance of the youths
is all but forgotten as the nation moves on. Not all move on though and it is
not only the parents who refuse to let go but the professor as well. He reminds
me of the intellectuals in the Korean New Wave films of the 1980s and early
1990s. It seems like a criticism of the systematic glossing over of a national
history that has become too difficult to bear, it is easier to forget.
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| Emotional but somewhat manipulative |
That last point seems very familiar, indeed I’ve already
mentioned it, but I think that
Children… takes more than a few pointers from
Memories of Murder and as it warrants the comparison it must be said that it
pales significantly in its wake. Other than that the film suffers from an odd
structure, an excessive running time, somewhat undeveloped characters, and too
much reliance on forced melodrama. The parts that work, and I’ve described them
at length, work wonderfully and are more-or-less worth giving the film a chance
but they are not supported by a substantive narrative. Maybe I’m getting a
little tired of kids going missing films, the last 12 months alone have given
us
Children…,
Man of Vendetta (2010), and
No Doubt (2010), all of which fell
short in some regard.
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