The Director Who Died At Work Lives Again

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Learning about foreign movies from film festivals is deeply misleading. Take Korea, for example. At all the major national film festivals you’ll see works by the country’s top directors, movies that tastefully dissect the impact of institutionalized violence on interpersonal relationships or some such concept, but you won’t see the bulk of movies about killer apartments, English-speaking pigs, and undercover cops falling in love that fill Korea’s screens for most of the year. It’s like judging American cinema by watching David Lynch and Sofia Coppola while ignoring the Wayans Brothers and “Step Up.” We get the best, but where’s the rest?

Fortunately, every year the New York Korean Film Festival (August 29 – September 3) takes a core sample of the Korean multiplex and delivers a representative batch of what Koreans are actually watching. Unspooling at the Anthology Film Archives, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the ImaginAsian theaters, the NYKFF reminds us that not every movie from Korea is a classic. But wait long enough, and even some of these solidly crafted genre flicks may enter the canon, as in the case of director Lee Man-Hee.

Rediscovered via a 10-film retrospective at the Pusan International Film Festival last year, four of Lee’s movies finally make it to New York tonight and tomorrow courtesy of the NYKFF, and time has brought their qualities to the fore.

One of those astonishing craftsmen who worked in every genre, making 50 films in the 1960s and ’70s, Lee coughed up blood all over his editing table while cutting “A Way to Sampo” (August 31) in 1975, begged his doctor to keep him alive long enough to finish the film, then died a few days later at age 49 of a cirrhotic liver. Known as “the poet of the night,” Lee had a sweet touch with noir, like “The Devil’s Stairway” (August 30), a thriller about a doctor who bumps off his wife to make room for his mistress before discovering that paranoia is a man-destroyer. But he also made plenty of romances and melodramas, like “Watermill” (August 30) and “A Road to Return” (August 31).

Points for perversion go to “A Road to Return,” a psychedelic romance about a writer, crippled in the Korean War, whose romantic novels (based on his marriage to a goody-two-shoes wife) are no longer selling. Castration fears explode like fireworks as she falls into the arms of a dapper journalist while he dresses in military drag and freaks out to patriotic anthems.

But the standout is “Watermill,” a rural noir so doom-laden and erotically charged that it practically moans as you watch it. A swarthy drifter, Shin Yeong-Gyun, spies the rough and randy wife of a bedridden farmer at an exorcism and later in a funeral procession. She, in turn, secretly watches him chop wood and writhes orgasmically in the grass to the resounding thwack of his axe. When they finally meet during a rainstorm they hardly say a word before he’s pawing at her hanbok and kneeling at her feet. Genuinely erotic, “Watermill” is undiscovered, unknown, and unmissable.

Through tomorrow (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).


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