THE “WORLD”’S OPINION – MUST SEE
Appeared at the forefront of the prolific South Korean film scene twenty-five years ago (The Quiet Family, 1998), Kim Jee-woon, now 59 years old, has distinguished himself through around ten feature films that are both popular and ultra-referential as a director, even a talented pasticheur. Ghost movie with Two sisters (2003), Hong Kong-inspired thriller with A Bittersweet Life (2005), western with The Good, the Bad and the Crazy (2008), horror thriller with I met the devil (2010). In 2013, he even made a brief Hollywood foray to direct Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Severely Testosterone Last Wall (2013).
It’s filming in Seoul!, his new film, confirms the humor that runs through all his work, by setting foot in the dish of a historical and self-reflexive comedy that hits the mark. This grotesque and unbridled closed session takes us back, in other words, to the 1970s in Seoul, to a film set. Kim is the main character, a director dependent both on his production company and the political-cultural censorship implemented by the dictatorial regime that reigned in South Korea since 1961, under the aegis of General Park Chung. -hee.
Eternal shadow man
Let us clarify, to fully understand the issues of the film, and therefore its comic springs, the problem of Kim. Kim was for a long time assistant to a great master of South Korean cinema whose passion for his art led him to perish in the flames during a shoot from which he did not want to turn away even as the fire raged. All film buffs who are even slightly versed in South Korean cinema will recognize in this figure Kim Ki-young, an immense filmmaker still little known in France, author of the unforgettable There Servant (1960), story of an insidious and terrifying takeover of power by a servant over a bourgeois family. Both the fate of Kim Ki-young, who tragically perished with his wife in a fire, and his most famous title, the plot of which nourishes that of the film (within the film) that Kim directs in It’s filming in Seoul!suggest it.
In any case, the character of Kim (whose irony is that he bears the same name as that of the author of It’s filming in Seoul!), eternal shadow man of an industry whose passage through assistantship is the keystone, then seizes his chance. His first film, we learn, was a success, but rumors are circulating according to which he stole a script from the master. In fact, all his subsequent achievements have failed and no one in the profession takes him seriously anymore.
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