Korea's competitive edge: On the 2023 Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan) for The Japan Times

The Johnny's fiasco in Japan is but one reminder that tight corporate/big business control over creative industries can result in corruption and stymie creativity (leaving aside charges of sexual abuse). When I was tasked to write about contemporary Korean vs. Japanese films in my latest column for The Japan Times, one of the starkest differences I found was between the processes of movie and series production in the two countries. In Japan, delivering a product on or under-budget and on-schedule is prioritized, and creatives are treated by corporate owners like disposable gig-economy workers. In Korea, it's more about making works of art. When you see films like "Parasite" and series like "Squid Game" and "D.P.," you get the gist.

Does South Korea now have the edge over Japan when it comes to film?

 

 

 

 

Thirty minutes into “Iron Mask,” the debut feature from Korean writer-director Kim Sung Hwan, its kendo-crazed antihero, Jae-woo (Joo Jong-hyuk), stares trancelike through shadows at an offscreen character, his eyes unblinking. Under fire from his dojo for excessive violence and foul play, Jae-woo’s terse line of self-defense is chilling: “We’re in competition here.”

That sentence gave me pause during the film’s premiere this summer at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan) in South Korea, where “Iron Mask” took one of two top awards. A vision of life as constant competition propels the most riveting of South Korea’s global cinematic sensations, from the Oscar-winning “Parasite” to hit Netflix series “Squid Game” and “D.P.” Characters on the verge of failure are tempted by Machiavellian schemes to survive in a society that respects only winners, and demands of its members brute desperation, fortitude and guile.

By comparison, many of the contemporary Japanese films and series I’ve recently seen — including those featured at this year’s BiFan, where Japanese genre works were spotlighted — feel listless and adrift, self-conscious portraits of Japan filtered through a soft-focus, navel-gazing nostalgia.

This is not always unpleasant. “Midnight Diner” has its charms, “Drive My Car” its moments of quiet beauty. And last year’s exquisitely patient “Zen Diary” plays like a tone poem. But the contrast between today’s South Korean and Japanese stories is stark: The former feel urgent, the latter calmly self-indulgent.

"Iron Mask" director Kim Sung Hwan

 

According to “Iron Mask” director Kim, this distinction reflects a South Korea that has supplanted Japan as the tradition-bound Asian society most conflicted by its new identity as a capitalist pressure cooker. “In the 20th century, overcoming competition and getting into the University of Tokyo was a very big deal for Japanese people,” he tells me. “Japan used to compete with the whole world. They worked so hard and were super competitive in order to survive and secure their jobs. I guess South Korea today is showing similar behavior.”

Launched 27 years ago, BiFan is Asia’s largest genre film festival, highlighting works that take their cue from the pioneering 20th-century French director Georges Méliès (“A Trip to the Moon”), who argued that films should convey fantasy rather than reality to make our dreams believable.

Japanese screenings at BiFan included “Life of Mariko in Kabukicho,” co-directed by Eiji Uchida and Shinzo Katayama. Set in Tokyo’s red light district, the film features a host of cliched scenes and characters that reinforce overused stereotypes: a flirtatious male host, a homey, soft-lit bar with chummy regulars, a seedy serial killer, an eccentric who thinks he’s a ninja, clueless foreign cops (the FBI in Japan?) and, yes, extraterrestrials.

As you might guess, the story sprawls and spins off too many threads to cohere. More damningly, it can’t seem to commit to being either a lighthearted ensemble farce or a feminist detective thriller, and it doesn’t have the confidence to alternate genres for meaningful effect.

 

In "Life of Mariko in Kabukicho," the FBI shows up in Kabukicho

BiFan’s closing film, “Sana,” suffers a similar lack of conviction. The latest from “Ju-on: The Grudge” franchise director Takashi Shimizu, “Sana” ended the festival with a whimper, wasting its potentially terrifying premise on a real-life J-pop boy band cast (Generations) with questionable acting skills. The ostensible target of throwaway “OK, Boomer” jokes, a 50-something private investigator (Makita Sports) who is also the film’s most compelling character, and the script’s obsession with 1980s tech in the form of a reverse-played audio cassette tape reveal its real concern: nostalgia for a more exciting era in Japan when the stakes were higher, pop music more magical and media formats reliably physical. 

And then there’s “Single8,” Kazuya Konaka’s affectionately retro account of Japanese high schoolers in the late 1970s who form an unlikely crew to produce a “Star Wars”-inspired 8-mm short film about an alien encounter. The world they inhabit is strictly analog, and the real hero of their story is an icon of Japan’s electronics-manufacturing heyday: Fujifilm’s long-discontinued Single-8 film format. The title of the students’ short film? “Time Reverse.”

Now take South Korean director Kim Su-in’s taut and relentlessly dark “Toxic Parents,” whose teen protagonist is glued to her smartphone, exchanging text messages with her naively earnest male homeroom teacher while an idol-wannabe frenemy tests her vulnerabilities and her monstrous mom drives her to suicide. Woah.

While Japan’s “Sana” and “Single-8” look back on school-age shenanigans as the source of their loosely-strung narratives, South Korea’s “Toxic Parents” penetrates a high school in the here and now that is hardcore: a locus for outrageous expectations, bullying and necessarily repressed trauma.

"Toxic Parents": a monstrous mom in the here and now

 

 “(South Korean films) today convey their subjects well and get a more universal response than Japanese films,” says BiFan program director Ellen Kim. “They address the class system and capitalism and the government and American imperialistic interference without any suppression. But the Japanese industry is very self-satisfactory. Big companies control all the processes of production, and they are inflexible.”

 

Japan’s tight corporate grip on filmmaking, she adds, turns talented Japanese actors into cogs of the gig economy: skilled creatives hampered by limited time and too many side jobs to focus on craft. “When South Korean actors have a film contract, they don’t do TV. But Japanese actors are treated like salaried workers finishing a product for release. They don’t have time to make art.”

 

Harvard professor and East Asian film specialist Alexander Zahlten agrees that the scope and reach of Japanese films are truncated by the industry’s dependence on corporate money. However, he points out that the current system once saved the Japanese film market from total collapse. “(It) allowed the Japanese film industry to not only survive but return to a position of strength over the past three decades. The early 1990s were a time when some could envision Japanese film shrinking away almost completely. But by the 2010s, the market share of Japanese films once again reached almost 70%.”

Over 11 days, BiFan 2023 hardly lacked in Japanese VIPs. Directors Uchida, Katayama, Konaka and Shimizu appeared alongside manga god Osamu Tezuka’s filmmaker son, Makoto Tezuka (“Tezuka’s Barbara”), Hollywood horror darling Ari Aster (“Midsommar”), veteran South Korean star Choi Min-sik (“Oldboy”), and the producers and lead actor from “D.P.,” which received this year’s Series Film Award. A festival record of 262 films from 51 countries were screened before 67,274 attendees, up 18.2% since 2022.

 

Director Makoto Tezuka, son of manga-anime pioneer Osamu, was one of many Japanese VIPs celebrated at BiFan

  

But to me, the finest Japanese entry screened last month at BiFan was “Millennium Actress,” an anime feature directed by the late Satoshi Kon and released in 2001. Through its portrait of an aging and reclusive movie star (modeled on actresses Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine), the film spans centuries, weaving art, history, war and romantic love into an epic homage to master directors Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu — icons of an era when Japan still competed with the whole world.

Time reverse, indeed.