THE UGLY
*½/****
starring Park Jeong-min, Kwon Hae-hyo, Han Ji-hyeon, Shin Hyeon-bin
written by Yeon Sang-ho, based on his graphic novel Face
directed by Yeon Sang-ho
火遮眼
**½/****
starring Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Brian Le
written by Frank Hui, Lei Zhilong, Tin Shu Mak, Kwan-Sin Shum, Aidan Parker
directed by Kenji Tanigaki
by Angelo Muredda In his 2007 book Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Ato Quayson suggests that disability “short-circuits” the protocols of representation, throwing into crisis all kinds of formal and thematic properties as a text struggles to account for its disruptiveness. If there’s a prize for the most aesthetic nervousness, or for a text whose nervousness about how to depict disability all but causes it to self-destruct, it ought to go to Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho’s dispiriting The Ugly. A slow-burn procedural mystery-thriller about a documentary crew and a son in arrested development getting to the bottom of a historical murder, The Ugly is thrown into a full-blown panic attack by the aesthetic challenge posed by something as simple as depicting its disabled characters moving through the world.
An adaptation of the nondisabled Yeon’s own graphic novel Face, which presumably has its own representational hangups where disfigurement and blindness are concerned, the film tells the story of Yeong-gyu (played by Kwon Hae-hyo in the present and Park Jeong-min in flashbacks), a blind stampmaker coming into fame in his twilight years for his lifetime of artisanal work. Just as he’s getting his due in both a career retrospective and a currently-shooting documentary by journalist Su-jin (Han Ji-hyeon), Yeong-gyu’s life is interrupted by the discovery of the skeletal remains of his long-missing wife, Young-hee, the mother of his son Dong-hwan (also Park). Convinced by Su-jin, who smells a better story in the cold-case plot than the disability inspiration porn she started with, Dong-hwan forgoes his father’s wishes to let his mother’s bones rest and embarks on an investigative campaign to interview some of her former colleagues from her time as a labourer in the garment district. Reluctant to talk at first, they eventually divulge Young-hee’s part as a whistleblower in a sexual-assault case at the factory, along with what strikes Dong-hwan as an even bigger bombshell: that his mother was so physically repulsive to everyone but his blind father that they called her “Dung Ogre” to her face.
From the name, you’d expect some kind of exploitation-movie reveal of the woman’s face, but Yeon goes so far in the opposite direction in search of something like tastefulness that he comes all the way back around to humiliation. Despite the numerous protracted, Rashomon-styled flashbacks to Yeong-gyu and Young-hee’s charmless romance, prompted by Dong-hwan’s interviews and set in a shoddily art-directed setting that feels on loan from a Netflix period K-drama (a testament to the apparently rushed production schedule and skeleton crew, framed as positives in the press notes), Young-hee is always shot from behind and over the shoulder. Her apparently grotesque face is withheld, lest it curse the spectator, Medusa-like, or fail to impress as being that ugly, or break the asinine self-imposed aesthetic rule that if Yeong-gyu doesn’t get to see how ugly she is, neither should we. By the fifth or sixth demurral, we’re in Austin Powers genital-obfuscation territory. When the murder plot is finally wrapped up and we get to see Young-hee’s face in an old photo–delivered at the end of a long-winding tracking shot whose duration doesn’t build suspense so much as it reminds you how often the film has taken the circuitous path rather than the direct one–you half-expect someone to shout, “The aristocrats!”
That reduction of the film’s thematic preoccupations to a punchline is too bad, because there’s something interesting about what The Ugly is ultimately trying to say about lateral violence within marginalized communities–the nasty desire, when one perceives oneself as being near the bottom of the social rung, not to get dragged any further by someone one rung down. The scenes of Yeong-gyu and Young-hee’s courtship are vaguely insulting anthropological examinations of what disabled couples surely behave like behind closed doors. But there’s a bit of bite to later flashbacks from Yeong-gyu’s perspective (the irony that we are seeing through his blind eyes does not go understated), which prove that nobody resented Young-hee’s supposed deformities like her visually impaired husband. Maybe it’s a nasty joke about how beggars can’t be choosers, but it might’ve rung true all the same as an insight about relative privilege within minority groups if Yeon weren’t so preoccupied with the precise choreography of his big reveal.
If The Ugly treats disability as an impossible challenge to storytelling, Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious returns it to its familiar place in genre filmmaking as a crutch to characterization so basic you could order it off Amazon. A revered action choreographer before he was a director, Tanigaki executes several memorable chase and fight sequences in a child-imperilment thriller that’s vaguely set “Somewhere in Southeast Asia” (the better to offend no one’s politics), conspicuously peppered with English-language dialogue (the better to sell the film internationally), and centred on the heroic actions of mute and traumatized tradesman and great dad Wei (Xie Miao), disabled because who doesn’t love a fighter with a handicap and a ready-made tragic backstory? Wei, a gentle guy whose fighting days are behind him–although he’s still training his precocious adolescent daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou) in the martial arts, despite her protestations that she would rather be pretty than know kung fu–is dragged back into the mess when Rainy storms out of an unwanted haircut and is promptly kidnapped by a crime syndicate running a child sex-trafficking ring. With the aid of journalist Navin (Joe Taslim), whose missing wife was nabbed by the same cartel that snatched Rainy while on the verge of unmasking their leadership, Wei sets off to punch his way through wave after wave of nasty guys to get his daughter back.
Though it’s a spiritual cousin of sorts to One Battle After Another, another story of a father pulled back into his old life of violence in search of his disappeared, martial arts-trained daughter, The Furious depends on our expectation that Wei will not only find Rainy–which he does within all of about two minutes, running into traffic after her on bloodied bare feet with the determination and disregard for the flesh of Robert Patrick’s T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day–but lose his cool in the process, unlike Leonardo DiCaprio’s bumbling, good-natured patriarch. Miao, a former child actor trading on his history as the junior partner to Jet Li in both The Legend of Shaolin and My Father is a Hero, nails his role as the adult stoic opposite Yang’s kung-fu kid here, silent and explosive to exactly the right degree as he runs and leaps and at one point even inventively uses his daughter as a melee weapon.
Tanigaki’s approach to disability is as mercenary and transactional as his approach to anything else. It’s a prop, like the giant ice block Wei uses in a battle with a heavy several times his size. Rainy’s child-endangerment plot is arguably too ugly for a film this weightless and matches Wei’s traumatized muteness in its dramatic perfunctoriness, though Rainy makes for a good backup foil when Navin isn’t onscreen, as chatty as her dad is silent. That’s helpful, since the villains don’t really make an impression as people outside of an unkillable henchman (Brian Le) and an eerie archer (The Raid‘s Enyou Yang) who slinks his way through the background of most of the brawls, methodically clearing rooms from a distance rather than getting his hands dirty. There’s nothing especially inspired about the film’s flat, televisual lighting and workmanlike compositions, the trope-saturated story beats, or the warmed-over characters (such as the good woman cop who’s transparently balancing out the corrupt male cop), but The Furious basically works on the strength of its prolific set-pieces, which make some music out of tired notes. The violence is refreshingly raucous and spirited and comfortably aimed at an endless procession of sex traffickers, kidnappers, and corrupt executives nobody will miss, including a vigorous hammer-to-the-head finish that’s a hands-on answer to John Wick’s penchant for double gunshots to the head and body. Like Miao’s performance, The Furious does precisely what it’s asked to do and nothing more; who could complain? The Ugly – Programme: Special Presentations; The Furious – Programme: Midnight Madness
