films 059: Frosted Window
Metacinematic Murakami
2025. dir. Kim Jong-kwan.
Viewed at BFI Southbank, London Korean Film Festival.
On first viewing this read to me merely as three Murakami-esque slice-of-life shorts; the Q&A session at the end opened my eyes to the underlying themes of creators as objects, of the way the lens (both literal and figurative) changes behaviour and our processing of it. All three acts are set in Seoul’s Seochon neighbourhood; Act I follows an artist (a painter) on a neighbourhood jaunt as he hits on various women, eventually succeeding with someone only to fall back into the trap of a smouldering situationship. Act II, set in a hole-in-the-wall neighbourhood bar, depicts an ambiguous ‘date’ setup wherein the lady plays coy, and is secretly interested in the bartender, with whom she has an ongoing flirtation. Act III is the most fractured and puzzling of the bunch: it follows an actress who’s recently suffered the loss of a child, processing her grief through a new acting role (in which she plays an actress), and her revelations around the weight of a bouquet. Each act features social performance, and yet — counter-intuitively — these performative interludes could equally be read as authentic expression.
The metacinema of it sealed the deal. Is each character an actor playing a part, or is each ‘role’ just an act of processing? Do the eyes inform the performance or vice versa? I’m firmly resident in the Complexity Addiction camp; with fiction the bigger the better, the more epic and ambitious the better, the denser and more Russian the better. And yet through this discussion I could see the appeal, in a way, of photograph-like framing, of true-to-life setting, and spare plotlines — the scope for interpretation is much greater when cognitive load is distributed away from all that heavy-duty perceiving; the scope for layered allegory is much higher when anchored in ideas at their most literal. I guess this was the mark of a good critic — one who converts the clueless.