The finest no cost streaming services for cinephiles is the Korean Movie Archive’s YouTube channel. It hosts an at any time-growing assortment of restored and subtitled movies that have been picked out for their exceptional good quality and their importance to the heritage of Korean cinema. Imagine a absolutely free US film archive that manufactured available Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Gone With The Wind and The Godfather, as nicely as a hundred other classics, and you begin to see what a present KOFA’s YouTube channel is to the earth.
Amid the numerous fantastic movies it offers, a person stands out over them all: Obaltan, Yu Hyun-mok’s 1961 masterpiece about lifestyle in Seoul in the aftermath of the Korean war. The finest way to realize the difference concerning how Obaltan is regarded in South Korea and how it is regarded in the west is to contemplate the effects of 3 polls.
In a poll of film-makers held in 1999 by the South Korean newspaper the Chosun Ilbo, Obaltan was voted the finest Korean film ever produced. In a 2014 poll of professionals organised by the Korean Film Archive alone, the title of biggest Korean movie was shared by a few flicks. They had been Ha Gil-jong’s bittersweet campus comedy The March of Fools Kim Ki-young’s satirical horror film The Housemaid (which is a favourite of Martin Scorsese’s and the acknowledged inspiration for Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-profitable Parasite) and, after once again, Obaltan.
In distinction, when the British Movie Institute’s Sight and Seem journal held the 2012 edition of its prestigious Greatest Films of All Time poll, Obaltan did not obtain a single vote from any of the 846 contributors. Other Korean classics received votes. Ed Wood’s System 9 From Outer Space got a vote. But Obaltan bought none. Evidently, this is a film that most audiences in the Anglosphere have however to find.
And what a movie they will find when they do. Obaltan – generally translated as “Stray Bullet” or, potentially more accurately, as “Aimless Bullet” – is as desolate and atmospheric as any American movie noir. It sits alongside The 3rd Person and some of the significant classics of Italian neorealism as just one of the great movies about peacetime in a metropolis nonetheless disfigured by war.
The brilliance of Obaltan’s narrative is that the movie focuses on whichever character is most essential to the motion for as long as they keep on being important to the action, and then withdraws from them nearly absolutely. Consequently, it will take a when to operate out which is the central character.
At initially, it would seem as if it could be Gyeongsik (Yoon Il-bong), a disabled veteran who now walks with crutches and feels he has missing his location in the globe as certainly as if he had in no way returned from the war. Then it appears to be Gyeongsik’s previous army comrade, Yeongho (Choi Moo-ryong), who is finding it in the same way hard to in shape into civilian culture.
Inevitably, we see that the character close to whom all the other folks are in orbit is in simple fact Yeongho’s brother, Cheolho (Kim Jin-kyu), a tranquil, dedicated accountant on whose smaller wage an overall extended family is dependent. The household lives in Haebangchon (“Liberation Village”), a hillside shanty town loaded with families that missing their residences in the war and / or defected from North Korea.
Cheolho’s wife is 9 months expecting. His brother is a legal responsibility. His sister is quickly to be arrested for prostitution. And his bedridden mother, who has put up-traumatic worry ailment or dementia or the two, thinks bombs are continue to dropping and frequently moans “Let’s go!” or “Let’s get out of listed here!” – by significantly the most renowned strains in the script – to kin who have nowhere to go and no way of getting there if they did.
On major of that, he has an incessant toothache he cannot manage to correct. Kim Jin-kyu’s overall performance is so effective that the discomfort seeps out of Cheolho’s enamel and into our have. Viewing activities wear him down is like viewing waves relentlessly eroding a precarious cliff.
The most haunting picture in Obaltan is one particular of the most haunting pictures I have ever observed. Pushed to crime, Yeongho botches a financial institution theft. Chased by the law enforcement, he flees via a sewer, where by he hears a baby’s cry. The newborn, he sees, is sure to its mother’s again. The mom has hanged herself. Yeongho runs on. So do the law enforcement officers. The little one continues crying.
The shot of the useless mother’s dangling body is as fleeting, and as unforgettable, as our 1st glimpse of Orson Welles in The Third Male. Viewing it, we realise – if we haven’t realised now – that the wretched life we have been subsequent in the movie are not strange. Everybody in post-war Seoul has a tale of suffering, and the city is indifferent to them all.
