“I tell you. In this crazy world we have to be like crows.”
“What kind of courage does a crow have?”
“Crows aren’t courageous, but they are tough – tough enough even
to attack a scarecrow. “The crow sits on top of its head and picks out its
eyes.”
As unremittingly dismal as Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths (1957), as socially observant as Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960), as basely
existential as De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves,
and drawing from shades of American Noir, STRAY BULLET (OBALTAN) creates an
effect of having been dragged through the worst mire of post-armistice South
Korea, where the sweat is left on our brow, the sting remains dull in our gut,
and the dirt laces the fibers of our worn clothes. STRAY BULLET leaves a
residue on the viewer because it sinks us into its universe wholly with no
sense of how to resurface. Misery loves company one might say, and director Yoo
elects us as such for the Song family as he dredges the bottom-most experience
of this period of social upheaval.
STRAY BULLET, a reference to waywardness and drifting
through experience, depicts the darkest turns in the life of public accountant
Chul-ho Song (Kim Chin-Kyu, of The Housemaid) who struggles with money and the
fracturing post-war era. Burdened in this time with the responsibility of
supporting two children, a mentally trouble mother, a malnourished pregnant
wife, his troublesome jobless younger brother Yong-ho (two years since returned
from the war), his sister Myong –sook who resorts to prostituting herself to
American Soldiers in order to make ends meet, and upholding the roof of their
dilapidated home, he hasn’t even the money to visit the dentist to resolve his ever-constant
toothache or buy his young daughter a pair of pretty shoes. But he tries. He
endures. He blankly thrusts himself into each grueling seemingly ineffectual
day, wearing the strain on his face, his posture, his stride, and in his
decaying tooth.
Yoo’s vision is steeped in the piteous condition of the Songs,
microcosmically indicative of the condition of an economically polarizing South
Korea still reeling from war and occupation (first by the Japanese and
afterward by the US.). Soldiers return home and cannot find work, those who
have jobs make meager sums, and an elite class (movie stars in particular)
occupies the higher tier while the poor get poorer – a wedge driven home by the
aesthetic noir-esque contrast of scenes drown in shadow, or awash in midday
sun. Kim Hak-sung’s location shooting also lends immediacy, gravity, and
authenticity to a story that requires all three qualities.
The concerns of OBALTAN are socio-economic, but also
existential, and moral. Yoo plainly exposes extreme conditions in lieu of directly
criticizing or politicizing the catalyst of
those conditions – even though critique and politics are perhaps unavoidably involved
simply through his act of observation (enough to have the film banned upon its
initial release). Yoo also allows for a range of relationships to form and be
challenged in ways more subtle than the main thread of economic disparity.
Scathing moments of Lee Beom-seon’s script ask fundamental
questions of morality in a time where dog-eat-dog is the rule. The frequent orator
of these questions is younger brother Song Yong-Ho. Seeming at first the most
aimless, spending his days drinking and complaining with war buddies, he
emerges as the most complex, immediate, and the most desperate among the group,
inherent in the crude culminating bank robbery scheme he hatches, and the
argument that takes place just before with his older brother.
Yong-ho: “I admire your [Chul-ho’s] way of life;
reasonable, honest, and poor as hell. But your life is like a ten-cent peep
show -- watching others get what they want. That's not enough for me. You and
your toothache! You think you’re helping us by not going to the dentist? That’s
how all tragedy starts. By some stupid futile sacrifice like that. Why do we
have to live in a cage? A cage of conscience!”
Chul-ho: “How
could we live together without any conscience?”
Yong Ho: “We’d just live, that's all. I should have
been bitter enough to take things into my own hands before my mother went crazy
and before my sister sold her body away! I should have started cheating the
first day we had that pitiful little shop in the market. I should have cheated
before those god-damned bullets went through my belly!”
All the other characters seem by degrees to submit to the
banality of their suffering, seem to be – as the cab driver remarks of delirious
post-surgery Chul-ho Song at the end of the film, “like one of those wild
shells that fired aimlessly.” Their courage to endure and participate in
scraping by with threadbare souls might even be seen as complacency next to
Song Yong-ho’s fever-pitch, or even Myong-sook’s nefarious methods, but they
can hardly be blamed in acknowledgement of the reality of their circumstances
and challenges, especially as the film concludes its escalating downward spiral
with only one small modicum of hope resounding.
Now, after 50 years of history, are these conditions yet
changed? Is the polarity and disparity any softer, and does the disadvantage
enabled by the system still produce attitudes like Song Yong-ho’s? Watching a
film like Jong Jae-eun’s TAKE CARE OF MY CAT from 2001 as an example, one might
fearfully see that the same spectrum endures, only the gray-scale is much subtler.
**Available on Cinema Epoch dvd**
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