Joint Security Area (2000)

This award winning Korean film is several things in one. Murder mystery, drama, action-flick, and history lesson for us westerners. Director Park Chan-Wook is juggling a number of things and manages to keep them all in the air. Most of the time, that is.

This movies largest asset is its unusual setting. The story takes place in the Joint Security Area (JSA) between North and South Korea. As we learn this is a no-man’s-land between the two Koreas, guarded by (south) Korean, Swedish, Swiss and American troops on one side and (north) Korean troops on the other. It is a sort of Asian “Berlin wall”. The setting offers westerners a view into Korean life that is at times both saddening and amusing, with all the silly security measures and rules applying to the zone.

The story starts out as a murder mystery: In a guard post on the north side of the JSA some north Korean guards have been killed and/or injured by a south Korean soldier guarding the other side, and a female Swiss officer with a Korean background is brought in to investigate. This is not so much a “whodunit” as a “whydunit”. For the suspect in custody is not talking, there are several statements that don’t make sense when put together and there is a magic bullet that is missing from the scene and could not have been fired from the suspects gun. So at the beginning, what we seem to have here is a Korean variation on “The Generals Daughter”. And that part of the movie is nothing in particular.

But then, before you can say Demilitarised Zone, things change. During an interrogation of the suspect, the audience, without warning, is thrown into a lengthy flashback. And it is this part of the story that makes up the heart of the film. For it revolves around our suspect striking up an (initially very tentative) friendship with his north Korean counterparts. Soon he brings in his fellow guard and the four soldiers meet up on the north Korean side of the JSA, swapping stories, music tapes, cigarettes and kindnesses. Rather than a murder mystery, the viewer is now seeing a tale of ill-fated brotherly love unfold. The director waves a delicate web here, completely discarding the first half of the film. He is showing us what these four have to learn from each other and what the taboos in their separate worlds are made up of. And it becomes very clear that the north Koreans have more to lose than their south Korean counterparts. Friendship it seems, is the biggest taboo of all, and that is interesting for a society that insists on calling everybody Comrade.

Near the end of the film Park Chan-Wook comes back to the investigation. He adds another lesson in Korean history, when he divulges something about the Swiss officer’s background, before he leads us to the conclusion of both the investigation and the movie. It is here that the action comes into it; there are plenty of army guys shooting of rounds to please those who enjoy such a thing. But the director does not abandon the drama he has initiated earlier. For at the end of the film Park Chan-Wook quietly dispenses with the myth that love conquers all. Sometimes the gap is just too wide. This touch of realism is very welcome and very true to the movie’s subject matter. Is gives the film surplus value.

This picture is decidedly Korean in its atmosphere and style. The images have a quiet poetry about them that is very effective without being flashy or obvious, and the movie progresses at a nice slow pace that does justice to the story being told. A large part of the scenes take place at night and they are perfectly lit gems. Cinematographer Kim Seung-ha also has a way with nature. He allows the director to use the scenery as more than just a background for the action of the characters. Together with some very well applied weather conditions (that may or may not have been created for the purpose of the scene) nature is an almost separate character in the story, adding depth and a distinct Korean tone.

And that brings me to the weak point of this film. It has been dubbed in American. Not English, mind you, American. Now dubbing has long since been a pet peeve of mine. I always prefer subtitles to dubs, because I believe dubbing takes away from the sincerity of the acting and as such from the truthfulness of the story being told. But here it is doing something much worse. The carefully constructed Korean atmosphere is ruined by the American sounding voices. It clashes with the Korean style of filmmaking and acting, which are so different from the American style that the voices do more than just not match. They take away a large part of what is good about this film. And that is what I meant by Park Chan-Wook not being able to keep things in the air all of the time. Because his careful constructions are undermined by the false sounding voices of the applied dubs.

I can only hope that one of the DVD extras will be the option of either the watching the dubbed version or the original language version with subtitles. In which case I wholly recommend you see this well made, poignant and intelligent film.

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