Bakha satang, 2000
[Peppermint Candy]
 In
the spring of 1999, a distraught and incoherent middle-aged man, Kim
Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu), dressed in a tailored business suit, lies along
the side of a railroad bridge that overlooks an open field by a lake.
Nearby, a loose knit group of friends called the Bong-woo Club, formed
20 years earlier at the same site during a social gathering of factory
employees, are holding their reunion. Yong-ho stumbles into the picnic,
seemingly by accident, and is immediately recognized by members of
the group as a fellow factory worker and aspiring photographer who
had joined them at the original outdoor event in 1979. Unable to disconnect
himself from his desperate, unarticulated anguish and join in the amusement
of his former colleagues, the inconsolable Yong-ho climbs to the railroad
tracks and throws himself in front of a passing train, shouting "I
am going back." The film then proceeds in reverse chronology through
the past 20 years to mundane, but emotionally revelatory episodes in
Yong-ho's life, from his family's estrangement, financial bankruptcy,
traumatic law enforcement career during the 1987 student demonstrations
for democratic reform of the Constitution, military service during
the crackdown of martial law protestors that led to the tragedy of
the 1980 Kwangju massacre, and the loss of his first (and true) love,
Sun-Nim (Moon So-ri).
Coincidentally released in the same year as Christopher
Nolan's similarly structured film, Memento (which,
in turn, recalls the reverse sequence narrative of the dissolution
of a marriage in David Hugh Jones' elegant screen adaptation of Harold
Pinter's Betrayal), Peppermint
Candy is an intimate and compelling account of the contemporary
history of South Korea as the nation moved towards democratization.
From
the opening image of a train immutably traversing a long, dark tunnel
(in an opening sequence reminiscent of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Dust
in the Wind), Lee Chang-dong establishes a parallel between
the motion of trains and the progression of time as signifiers
of human
(and national) transition: the interstitial shots from a train
traveling backwards that episodically connect the stages in Yong-ho's
life; Sun-Nim's bittersweet departure after visiting an emotionally
callous Yong-ho, who had recently become a police officer (and
abandoned his earlier ambition of becoming a photographer) at a
time when brutality and torture of prisoners were tolerated as a
means of gaining information and rooting out opposition to the military
coup government of General Chun Du-Wan; the unforeseen consequences
of the Kwangju military suppression as a frightened, wounded Yong-ho
awaits medical assistance in a train yard. By creating a regressive
chronicle of Yong-ho's ultimately tragic life through seminal
events
in late 20th century South Korean history, the film serves as an
incisive and affecting portrait of the uncalculated human toll of
the painful, and often traumatic reconstruction of a war torn nation.
© Acquarello 2003. All rights reserved.
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A
flighty, aimless man named Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu), insufficiently
dressed in a summer shirt on a brisk winter day, arrives at a major
city thoroughfare to wait for a bus, biding his time by cursorily
scanning through a rack of inexpensive sweaters peddled on the
sidewalk. Arriving at his intended destination, a multi-level urban
residential complex, Jong-du attempts to surprise the occupant by
knocking under the playful pretense of laundry service, only to
encounter a bewildered stranger who immediately slams the door shut.
Unable to find information on the former residents, Jong-du imposes
on a restaurant owner by ordering dinner with the naive expectation
that he will telephone his younger brother, Jong-sae (Ryoo Seung-wan),
who, in turn, will come to fetch him and pay for his meal. However,
unable to contact Jong-sae, Jong-du complicates matters by attempting
to escape after the police arrive, an impulsive act that sends him directly
to the police station, where his prior conviction for a fatal hit-and-run
accident is used to confirm his disreputable history of police infractions.
The inconvenienced Jong-sae is eventually summoned to collect Jong-du
from the precinct and brings him to their eldest brother Jong-il's
(Ahn Nae-sang) modest apartment, eager to shift the burden of responsibility
for the unemployable Jong-du. However, Jong-du soon begins to court
trouble when he pays an unwelcomed visit to the accident victim's
family and becomes determined to assist the victim's daughter, Gong-ju
(Moon So-ri), a young woman afflicted with cerebral palsy, after being
abandoned in the squalid tenement by her selfish brother, Sang-shik
(Son Byung-ho) and his wife (Yoon Ga-hyun).