SLEEP
Jam
**/****
starring Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun
written and directed by Jason Yu
SMUGGLERS
Milsu
***/****
starring Kim Hye-soo, Yum Jung-ah, Park Jeong-min, Zo In-sung
screenplay by Ryoo Seung-wan, Kim Jeong-yeon
directed by Ryoo Seung-wan
by Bill Chambers Jason Yu’s Sleep had me at hello. Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) are a young couple expecting their first child. One night, out of the blue, Hyun-Su starts talking in his sleep. “Someone’s inside,” he says. Soo-jin wonders if he’s trying to tell her something. It’s the opening scene of Poltergeist with considerably less grandeur, but horror, like punk, thrives in lo-fi. (The movie’s biggest formal swing is to instantaneously alter the mood of a scene through jump cuts or abrupt lighting changes.) Though Hyun-Su has no memory of the incident, he thinks he knows why he said what he said: because he’s an actor and one of the lines he has in his current project is, “Someone’s inside the building.” It’s enough to placate Soo-jin until the following night, when he dozes off and…well, you’ll have to see for yourself. Soon, bedtime becomes a jack-in-the-box full of nasty surprises that have Soo-jin sleeping with one eye open. A doctor gives Hyun-su what would be very practical and hopeful advice for someone suffering from an actual sleep disorder, but is that what’s going on? Or is something supernatural waiting until he lies down at night to use him as a marionette? And what, if anything, do the new downstairs neighbours, a single mother and her adolescent son, have to do with his condition?
I appreciated Sleep‘s studious avoidance of pregnancy-in-horror tropes–the baby, who arrives around the halfway mark, isn’t wicked, or the Chosen One, or a sacrificial lamb–but was given to wonder about the baby’s narrative function beyond manufacturing concern for a helpless being in a movie that has the temerity to kill cute animals. (That’s one of the things I definitely don’t love about Sleep.) Destined to be discussed as an allegory for how it can start to feel like sinister forces are at work for sleep-deprived parents of a newborn, the picture is really about a couple experiencing the first real crisis of their marriage and falling out of sync. Their roles until now have been disparate yet complementary, with Soo-jin the breadwinner to Hyun-su’s starving artist, but he becomes the pragmatic one as she reverts to the superstitious hick she thought she’d left behind when she married him, and they’re reduced to ships passing in the night as she insists on staying vigilant while he sleeps. I have to be honest, I came to resent the film by the time it heartlessly interrupted a sweet and tender father-daughter moment where Hyun-su congratulates his infant daughter on a big poop. It just doesn’t have the aesthetic/moral/philosophical ballast to support its mean streak, and the last 10 minutes are a graceless torrent of arcane “rules” that lay bare a breathlessly disappointing BigBad. I know it was well-received at TIFF, suggesting it plays better with a Midnight Madness crowd (I watched it alone at home), but as it stands, Sleep had me at hello–and lost me by goodbye.
Also from South Korea, Smugglers, from homegrown hitmaker Ryoo Seung-wan, is a 1970s period piece about women free-divers (haenyeo) who dredge up stolen cargo from the sea. As we see in the wistful opening sequence, a sort of Esther Williams water ballet set against the incongruous backdrop of a rusty trawler named Ferocious Dragon, our heroes used to dive for abalone to supply the fishmongers, but a chemical plant destroyed the underwater ecosystem in their little village of Kunchon–and, it should be said, the one above, too, forcing the women to ply their trade as criminals. Wildly successful at first, they’re caught by customs during a gold-smuggling operation that leaves their beloved Captain dead and everyone–including his daughter, Jin-sook (Yum Jung-ah)–assuming that Choonja (Kim Hye-soo), who’s escaped to safety, narced on them. Two years later, Choonja resurfaces in Seoul with an auburn mane of Farrah Fawcett hair and a newfound swagger. (The film commemorates her makeover–and a slight adjustment in genre–with a shift in aspect ratios from 1.85:1 to 2.35:1.) She aims to reboot Ferocious Dragon Shipping by wooing Korea’s number-one smuggler, Mr. Kwon (Zo In-sung), who’s been looking for a sleepy port like Kunchon to unload his shipments. Choonja’s also seeking redemption: Whether or not she was the mole, she still left her old crew high and dry.
Smugglers is the kind of easy spectacle we took for granted in the ’90s, executed with a panache we haven’t seen much of since then, either. I know that critics have often compared Ryoo Seung-wan, with whose work I’m unfamiliar, to Guy Ritchie, and while I can see that in the picture’s colourful rogues’ gallery, there’s a crispness to the direction here that reminds of the effortless classicism of a Renny Harlin or a Jan de Bont–although the fight sequences betray the influence of Ryoo’s mentor, Park Chan-wook. (He sure does enjoy an Oldboy-esque melee.) It’s unfortunate the screenplay’s well-worn grooves don’t deliver the same nostalgic rush, but it’s refreshing to see women seamlessly foregrounded in what is, when all’s said and done, a neo-pirate movie, something even Harlin couldn’t pull off in his day. They’re not just male characters in drag, though having said that, I loved the moment where Choonja reveals her glam hairdo is a wig, possibly one of the ones made by Jin-sook during her brief stint in prison for the botched heist. It’s a touching and remarkably subtle bit of friendship-as-destiny, appropriately smuggled like contraband into a formulaic yarn. SLEEP – Programme: Midnight Madness; SMUGGLERS – Programme: Gala Presentations
