Boats Against the Current: on “Burning”

Early on in the director Lee Chang-Dong’s latest film Burning, a young woman named Hae-mi sits across the table from her childhood friend Jong-su and pantomimes eating a tangerine. Having grown up long ago in the same town, they’ve just run into each other on the streets of Seoul, where Jong-su was strolling by as Haemi danced by a department storefront, hawking products at passersby. She sways seductively in a mini skirt to a K-pop beat, a cog in the capitalist machine; tells Jong-su, a farmworker, recent graduate, and struggling fiction writer, that he may not recognize her on account of plastic surgery; and invites him to grab a drink, where she peels and then eats the imaginary tangerine, depositing its imaginary skin into an imaginary bowl. The key to pantomime, she tells her companion, is not to visualize an object’s presence but to “forget that it isn’t there.” And so begins their dalliance, later consummated at Hae-mi’s cramped apartment and then promptly interrupted when she takes a trip to Kenya and returns to town with Ben, a handsome, disarming city-slicker who drives a Porsche Carrera and can’t remember ever shedding a tear.

Burning, though, based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, is far more than the mysterious, erotic, sexually-charged love triangle at its core. A follow-up to Lee’s tender last effort Poetry, this film is no less than a contemporary update of The Great Gatsby, an utterly thrilling and perplexing cinematic achievement that has more to say about How We Live Now than so many movies that strain for socio-political resonance heavy-handedly, with perfunctory gestures of topicality. And boy, does Burning say it beautifully, with easy wit, sonic and visual grammar, and, as the title suggests, a simmering, pyromaniacal tension that builds steadily through its two-and-a-half-hour runtime and lingers thereafter like a plume of smoke.

Jong-su and Ben, like Nick Carraway and Jay Gatz, are a study in opposites. The former wears hoodies and gym shorts, moving through the world with little money and a kind of perpetual bemusement. Ben, however, often seen in stylish sweatpants and glossy sunglasses, is rich andself-possessed, extending a firm hand when in the presence of strangers and smiling a tight-lipped smile that at once suggests charm and condescension. Neither of them seem to notice Hae-mi, the very reason for their acquaintance, and are instead preoccupied by something of a metaphorical dick-measuring contest. Upon returning from Kenya, Hae-mi tells them of an African tribe that dances the “little hunger” and the “great hunger.” The first refers to one’s literal appetite, the second to a craving for the meaning of life. When she shows them the dance for the first time, Jong-su’s eyes are fixed on Ben, who crosses his legs and yawns in a way that calls to mind Jude Law’s turn as Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

If Jong-su, our protagonist, is a kind of Nick Carraway, the tepid, reserved figure through whom we interpret all the action, then Hae-mi is something like Daisy Buchanan, a woman who searches endlessly for depth and meaning in a world governed by money and men. Played by the beguiling Jong Seo-Jeon in her first ever film role, the character is drawn simplistically as a kind of manic-pixie-dream-girl, a foil for the film’s study of toxic masculinity and millennial disaffection. She falls asleep in restaurants, cries when telling Ben and Jong-su about a sunset she encountered in Africa, and professes a desire to vanish, not die, because “dying is too scary.” And, about half-way through the film, vanish she does, at which point Burning morphs from a relatively muted character-driven drama into a psychological thriller that proceeds like a game of cat and mouse, moving between Seoul and Paju, the mountainous province by the North Korean border where Jong-su lives.

We might understand F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel as a tragedy because its characters taste the American Dream before it slowly slips from their grasp. The tragedy of Burning, however, is that the dream — the dream of self-determination; of pleasure beyond the material; of satiating both a literal and metaphorical hunger — appears to have already died. When we’re introduced to Jong-su, whose father, a farmer, is on trial for assaulting a government official, voices on the radio tell of staggering youth unemployment and the election of Donald Trump at the hands of disgruntled voters. It’s a passing reference, easy to dismiss, but Lee’s decision to include it winks knowingly at certain culture fissures, a kind of provincial and perhaps universal amorality.

The central figures in Burning, even as their circumstances vary widely, are stuck in a liminal space between freedom and the quiet oppression of institutional forces. Hae-mi exploits her body to attract people to a department store raffle; she takes solace in the single ray of sunlight that reflects off the Seoul Tower and into a small window in her apartment. Ben, the provenance of his wealth unknown, isn’t driven by that same quest for depth. He’s content, like Gatsby, with the appearance of satisfaction. Ben’s sure he cried as a little boy, he says, “but there are no tears, so there’s no proof of sadness.” Jong-su’s farmhouse, meanwhile, is so close to the North Korean border that his radio receives a signal from the country’s propaganda broadcasts, suggesting how little separates freedom from captivity, especially when freedom doesn’t feel much like freedom at all.

It’s ironically in the presence of the North Korean border that the film’s greatest scene takes place, a patient, slow-burning encounter between all three characters where the forces of shame and desire converge in a kind of epic visual poem. It occurs about halfway through the film, when Ben and Hae-mi decide to pay Jong-su a visit at his farmhouse as he’s busy feeding goats. The three characters, sitting on lawn chairs in Jong-su’s backyard, share glasses of wine and a joint. They’re shooting the shit like young adults do, but there’s a tension in the air, a strange sense that their lives have led them here, to this periwinkle sunset hovering above the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Hae-mi giggles and takes off her shirt, the sound of Miles Davis’ trumpet swelling as she dances the little and then the great hunger, her body rendered in a dark silhouette as it goes slack and becomes one with the harmony and the landscape. It calls back to her earlier line about pantomime, the idea that enjoyment, especially in a world as profoundly isolating as the one in which Burning takes place, is often contingent upon our capacity to ignore reality and invent a new, more palatable one.

Later, Haemi has fallen asleep and the men are left alone. Jong-su tells Ben he’s in love with the girl, and Ben replies with a secret of his own: he likes to set fire to greenhouses. He does this every two months, he says, and when Jong-su questions the ethics of this habit Ben tells him there’s no such thing, “just the morals of nature.” The disclosure suggests not only the character’s possible sociopathy but the filmmaker’s critique of class divisions in a world where some fight for scraps — the chiaroscuro created by a single ray of sunlight, perhaps — and others burn things down for sport. It’s a world, and a film, where danger lurks even if you can’t figure out where, one in which intention, motive, sincerity, even something as simple as whether or not Haemi actually has a cat named Boil, is wonderfully ambiguous.

Lee Chang-Dong makes so many right decisions in Burning, from the film’s patient but locomotive pacing to its faint, sinister score, composed by Lee Sung-hyun. Perhaps his best move, though, was the casting of his central trio of actors, who inhabit their characters with a curiosity and presence that acts as a plot-stimulant. The aforementioned Jong Seo-Jeon gives depth and heart to a character that’s mostly one-dimensional in Murakami’s original story. She’s fascinating to watch opposite Yoo Ah-in, who lends Jong-su’s diffidence a real corporal element that can be seen in the gangly, self-effacing way he carries himself. The most bravura turn here, though, is the Korean-American actor Steve Yeun as Ben, who seems inspired not only by Gatsby, but Patrick Bateman, John Cassavetes in Rosemary’s Baby, and Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, a film that cultivates tension with the same careful hand as Burning. Yeun, best-known for his role in The Walking Dead, allows us to see Ben’s appeal in a way the rightfully suspicious Jong-su can’t. We’re made wary of him, but we can’t really figure out his inner-life, and less so whether or not he’s responsible for Hae-mi’s disappearance. Jong-su calls him one of “so many Gatsby’s in Korea,” rehearsed and mysterious, a man of the zeitgeist.

Burning, too, is a film about the zeitgeist. Streets are congested, but everyone feels strangely alone; cell phones ring ad infinitum, but rarely is someone on the other line; almost every scene stirs with a sense of class warfare, but there’s a tacit and tired acceptance of inequity, as though the world has filtered out the haves from the have-nots with some kind of algorithm. This is what life sometimes feels like in America today, but rarely do we stop and consider the prospect that loneliness transcends borders, that sunlight can be shared, that destruction — of greenhouses, of whole societies — is divorced from a sense of right and wrong, carried out in absent mind. Instead we retreat inward, boats against the current, burning with hungers both little and great.