Burning

Burning is a good 105 minute or so film trapped in a 148 minute film. This gives me an opportunity to talk about movie length. We all know Roger Ebert's maxim: "No good film is too long, no bad film is too short," but there are movies that could stand trimming to be made better. Burning is one of them. I watched it on DVD, so I could stop and start it (which I did often). If I had to see it straight through in a theater I would have probably disliked it.

This is the third film I've seen by director Lee Chang-dong, after Poetry and Secret Sunshine. It is again a drama about South Koreans living out their lives in quiet desperation, but this one adds a mystery angle, as a character disappears.

Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami (which probably takes less time to read than to watch the film), Burning centers around Yoo Ah-in as a recent college graduate and would-be writer who is forced to come take care of his father's cattle farm while the old man is on trial for assaulting a civil servant. He meets a childhood friend (Jeon Jong-seo), who is beautiful and something of a manic pixie dream girl who takes him to bed right before she sets off for a trip to Africa. Yoo takes care of her cat, though he never sees it (but there is evidence of its existence) and when he picks her up at the airport he finds she has met another Korean, Stephen Yeun, who Yoo likens to Jay Gatsby, as he is young, rich, and no one knows how he made his money.

References to literature abound in the film. At one point a family friend talks about writing with Yoo, saying his father would make a good protagonist: "All protagonists are nuts, aren't they?" We can assume that Lee is considering Yoo his protagonist, because Yoo is a bit nuts, masturbating in Jeon's empty apartment and being unable to act on almost anything. He is also says William Faulkner is his favorite writer, because when he reads him he feels like Faulkner is writing about him. Good lord, which book does he feel that way about, what character? Joe Christmas? For those who have read Faulkner its kind of a jarring statement.

Yeun befriends Yoo, although he looks a bit down on him. He confides that he has a hobby--arson. He likes to burn down abandoned greenhouses. But Yoo can find no evidence of this, and then, after making a crude comment to Jeon, she disappears. Yoo starts to suspect Yeun, and the film ends rather chillingly.

I did like this film, but parts of it are so leisurely I just wanted to yell at it. Lee's films tend to be longish, the other two I've seen are also about 140 minutes. I haven't seen enough South Korean films to know if this is a cultural thing, and I'm sure I sound like the ugly American, but unless it's a full-scale epic, films should be two hours or under. People have to pee.