an indecisive and bewitching love triangle

ARTE.TV – ON DEMAND – FILM

With burning, Lee Chang-dong, a great name in Korean cinema, never let go of this keen eye which makes each of his films a cruel protest against the muted forms of barbarism which characterize advanced liberal society.

The case is played here on the embers of a desynchronized love triangle, between a girl and two boys. The girl’s name is Haemi. Slender, mannered, feverish, we find her, at the beginning of the film, as a cheerleader enticing passers-by at the entrance to a shopping mall. It is there that she meets Jongsu, as young as she is, a big boy with a lost air, hiding under his silences a sensitivity on edge. They went to school together and he found her ugly.

She takes mime lessons, wants to become an actress. He is the son of a peasant, delivery man, aspiring writer. They see each other again, desire each other, possess each other. Their embrace is short-lived. She leaves for several weeks on a trip to Africa, leaves him the keys to her apartment and the care of feeding a cat that will never show up. On his return, while he is waiting for her at the airport, a new situation suddenly emerges. Accompanied by a casual young man who wears handsome and whom she has just met on the plane, Haemi chooses to leave with the latter, Ben, in a Porsche Carrera, rather than in the rusty and dilapidated utility of Jongsu, which s bow without flinching.

exhaustion of passions

An indecisive period begins, during which the three young people see each other, without Jongsu, stoically submitting to Ben’s unbearable sufficiency, being able to determine with certainty the young girl’s motivations. In the next step, Haemi is no longer content to be a mystery, she becomes an absence. Disappeared, body and property. Jongsu, immersed in a sort of stuporous melancholy cut off from the cold inner rage, begins to follow Ben like his shadow to try to find out where the young girl is.

All those who do not demand answers from a work of art at all costs should allow themselves to be seduced by its undecidability. Has Haemi herself really disappeared? Ben, the Korean Gatsby, does he burn greenhouses out of sheer idleness or is he bluffing? Is the desire for murder that rises in Jongsu fulfilled or is it the first stone of the novel he promises to write?

It is perhaps less important to decide than to be seized by the atmosphere. A tone of the end of the day, an exhaustion of passions, a fading light, an existential suffocation bathe burning. From the painting emanate inconceivable beauties, such as this scene in Jongsu’s garden, enveloped in the complaint of Miles Davis, where the naked young girl dances for the two silent boys, their silhouettes silhouetted against the twilight which falls on the foothills separating on the horizon the two Koreas.