Based on Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning,” South
Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” is an indelible, slow-burn thriller
that begins as a quiet character study, detours into an enigmatic tale of
romance and jealousy, then finally emerges as a chilling and unsettlingly
elusive mystery.
“Burning”
tells the story of quiet, unassuming country boy Jong-su
(Ah-in Yoo). He has vague dreams of becoming a
novelist, but in the meantime works as a delivery driver in big-city Seoul. By
chance, one day he runs into Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jun), a young woman who says they knew each other as
children growing up in the same provincial village. Some brief conversation
unexpectedly leads to sex, and afterward Hae-mi tells
Jong-su that she’ll be leaving on a mission to
Africa. She asks him to look after her cat while she’s gone; with little else
to do, he accepts.
The film
takes its time in this early section, allowing us to observe Jong-su and get a sense of his rather sad little world. His
mother walked out when he was just a child, and his lonely military veteran
father is imprisoned and awaiting trial for assaulting a police officer. On his
own, Jong-su’s left to tend to the family’s tiny,
rundown dairy farm. But he continues to honor Hae-mi’s
request, and in her absence she grows into an object of fantasy for the
increasingly obsessed young man.
So he’s crushed
when Hae-mi returns and she introduces him to her
mysterious new friend Ben (Steven Yeun), whom she met
while abroad. Ben is wealthy, cultured, handsome, and witty — in short,
everything Jong-su is not. As the relationship
between the three grows into something of a love triangle, Ben’s air of
entitlement and superiority begins to get under Jong-su’s
skin. One night, the three get stoned and Ben confesses to Jong-su that he has a secret hobby of burning abandoned
greenhouses to the ground. Shortly thereafter, Hae-mi
vanishes without a trace.
Suspecting
Ben has something to do with Hae-mi’s disappearance,
Jong-su takes it upon himself to solve the mystery.
But his investigation, fueled by frustration, longing, and a suppressed rage
looking for an outlet, seems less about discovering what happened to Hae-mi than restoring his own wounded pride.
Bubbling
under the film’s surface are the tensions of a disenfranchised working class —
snippets of news broadcasts about skyrocketing unemployment rates and Donald
Trump sound bites we hear warbling from Jong-su’s
television aren’t there by accident. The narrative smolders with jealousy,
thwarted masculinity, and class resentment; the growing tension between them
all creates a feeling of doomed inevitability.
Most of all,
“Burning” traffics in ambiguity. Every new detail of its narrative only makes
the truth that much murkier. Facts gets distorted and memories are never as
clear as their owners claim. It’s a puzzling psychological character study of
three distinct individuals that grows cloudier as we realize our impressions of
two of them have been filtered through the third’s skewed perspective.
In his first
leading Korean film role, Steven Yeun gives a
magnetic performance as Ben. Charismatic, with air of quiet menace, we can
never be sure of Ben’s true motivations, and Yeun
lets us read what we will from his character’s opaque exterior. Making her film
debut, Jeon portrays Hae-mi as an impulsive young
woman plagued with an ineffable sadness that neither Ben nor Jong-su bother to notice.
Chang-dong’s
deliberately-paced direction builds the narrative slowly before tightening its
vice-like grip on its way to its shocking ending. What it all means is open to
interpretation: Is “Burning” a portrait of alienated youth? An exploration of
simmering class divides? A murder-mystery involving one or maybe three
sociopaths? Wherever you land, the picture it paints is a difficult one to
shake.
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2019.
