(This essay was originally published in Korean translation in the film
weekly Cine21, in January 2009.)
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| Han Suk-kyu in No. 3 (1997) |
Sometimes I wish that Song Neung-han's No.
3 had been made four or five years later than it actually was. I imagine it being released in 2002 or
2003, and stunning both critics and audiences with its distinctive characters
and elegant staging of one gangster's epic, self-inflicted fall. I guess it would have sold between 5 and
6 million tickets, providing a bridge between popular hits My Wife Is a
Gangster and Hi, Dharma and the "well-made" auteur films
of 2003: Memories of Murder, A Tale of Two Sisters, Oldboy
(never mind that it would have been impossible to assemble the same cast in
2002 as in 1997). If I could
rewrite the recent history of Korean cinema, this is how I would assemble the
plot: No.3 would have saved the Korean
gangster comedy.
As it was, No.3 appeared ahead of its
time. Korean audiences were not as tuned in to local films in 1997, so word of
mouth was slow to spread, and it did not perform very well commercially. More importantly, the model of a commercial genre merged with a strong auteur
sensibility did not really exist at that time. Song Neung-han stands as somewhat of a lonely pioneer. This is not to say the film did not have
influence: it helped to launch the
career of Song Kang-ho, and it bears some elements in common with the films of
Kim Jee-woon, Bong Joon-ho, and Choi Dong-hoon, among others.
 |
| Kang Seong-jin, Yu Oh-seung, Lee Sung-jae, and Yu Ji-tae in Attack the Gas Station (1999) |
Some critics point to No. 3 as the starting
point of the Korean gangster comedy, but it seems to me that the character and
attitude of the sub-genre sprung from another source: Kim Sang-jin's Attack the Gas Station (1999). It's not just that Attack the Gas Station was a huge
commercial success that featured a prominent brawl with gangsters. It tapped into the mindset that would
provide the foundation for later works. Anthropologist Nancy Abelmann and education professor Jung-ah
Choi analyzed the film in an essay published in the anthology New Korean Cinema in 2005. To them, the core attitude of the film
is contained within the reason given for robbing the gas station: 'geunyang,’ loosely translated as "just
for the hell of it." The
casual self interest and rejection of social responsibility contained within
that word were representative of broader changes in Korean society, they
argued. For decades, the state had
asked Koreans to subordinate the personal and the indulgent for the greater
good. 'Geunyang' was a rejection
of this logic.
This "geunyang" attitude also reverberated throughout the
gangster comedy, re-emerging, for example, in the poster copy for the 2001 film
My Boss My Hero ("That's right,
more gangsters... Got a problem with that?"). It may not have been a noble sentiment, but it imparted to the
films their particular energy. Many critics considered the famous gangster comedy quartet of
2001 – Kick the Moon, My Wife is a Gangster, Hi Dharma!, My
Boss My Hero – to be a shameful regression in the development of Korean cinema,
but the films themselves are interesting in many ways. My personal favorite is My Boss My Hero, for the way it combines
melodrama with an ironic sense of moral outrage (given the fact that it is
gangsters fighting school officials, in the name of social justice) leading up
to a very Korean-style emotional climax. Hi Dharma is structured more like a Hollywood film,
even if it feels very local in its details (its setting in a Buddhist temple,
Korean games, provincial accents, etc.). Both films benefit from a good sense of comic timing and
effective narrative plotting, and they are genuinely funny – an achievement
that is more difficult to attain than many people assume.
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| Jeong Joon-ho in My Boss, My Hero (2001) |
My Wife is a Gangster may not have been as well crafted as the two films mentioned above, but
it remains the iconic example of Korean gangster comedy. Perhaps the most defining characteristic
of these early gangster comedies was their high-concept nature: you could summarize the plot in a single
sentence, and even that one sentence could motivate viewers to see the film. A friend once told me about a film
director from the Philippines, who after hearing just the title of My Wife is a Gangster, burst out
laughing and said, "I gotta see that film!" The movie itself could have been
improved in many ways, but its central character played by Shin Eun-kyung
(thrown into relief by the great supporting role by Park Chang-myun) is one of
the most enduring characters of contemporary Korean cinema.
Taken individually, any of these films would have been interesting but
not especially noteworthy – but the emergence of a new trend created something
that was greater than the sum of its parts. Viewers who went to see a "new
gangster comedy" approached it with a particular set of expectations, and
directors could play off those expectations in interesting ways. Internationally as well, the Korean
gangster comedy (however briefly) become a sort of brand. It's rare for a film industry to
successfully create a specialized sub-genre of its own, but there are both
commercial and creative advantages to keeping such sub-genres alive.
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| Park Sang-myeon and Sin Eun-kyeong in My Wife Is a Gangster (2001) |
Ultimately, however, the girls high school horror film (launched in 1998
with Whispering Corridors) would
prove to be far more successful at perpetuating itself than the gangster
comedy. To ensure that a
specialized sub-genre lives on, it isn't necessary to produce only good films. In fact, even a string of unremittingly bad
films can keep a sub-genre alive if they attempt something new and create a
sense of forward movement.
Initially, Marrying the Mafia (2002) provided some hint that the
gangster comedy might enjoy a long life, but somewhere along the line,
producers began to view the Korean gangster comedy as a lemon to be squeezed
until all the juice was gone. I
sat through all of those "lazy sequels" that appeared in the
subsequent years – films which introduced nothing new to the genre and merely
cashed in on fading memories of old jokes. If the plots of the early films could be summarized in one
intriguing sentence, the plots of the later sequels could be summarized as
"more of the same." Sometimes
a big hit can do more damage to the lineage of a sub-genre than a commercial
flop, if millions of viewers buy tickets only to see for themselves that the
creativity is gone.
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| Seong Ji-roo, Yoo Dong-geun, and Park Sang-wuk in Marrying the Mafia (2002) |
It's perhaps understandable that film critics might look down on the
gangster comedy, but it's sadder when the people actually producing the films
don't consider them worthy of good craftsmanship. Personally, I regret the fall
of the gangster comedy – I think it had a good start, and it could have evolved
into a tradition worthy of pride. But
now, I think it is too late. With
deepest apologies for the sexist metaphor, the Korean gangster comedy is like a
Chosun-Dynasty era yangban family
that has failed to produce a son. It
will be no easier to revive it, than to start a completely new lineage.
Darcy Paquet is the founder of Koreanfilm.org, and the author of New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves
(2009).
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