Korea Nineteen Sixties.

When it showed up in the Cinema Reborn schedule, my attention focussed on Hyun-mok Yoo's 1961 Obaltan / Aimless Bullet / The Stray Bullet which had the advantages of being unfamiliar and coming from South Korea in the sixties. 

Beongeoli Sam-ryong /Samyong the Mute.

Such films are scarce but not unknown. Sang-ok Shin's 1964 Beongeoli Sam-ryong / Samyong the Mute turned up in the Sydney film festival of it's year and there is a line of them on You Tube, some nice transfers most unsubtitled, but they still fall pretty much outside our usual movie experience. We know more about the recent dim witted  North Korean cinema after some stunt showings here.

Aimless Bullet was made eight years after the end of the Korean War and in the brief period of relaxed censorship between two military dictatorships, compare Czech films from the Post WW2 Pre-Communist era. Admired on its home turf, it has been recently restored and circulated.

Ridiculously grim, this one  kicks off with a bunch of unemployed former soldiers slacking in a seedy Seoul bar where they drink more than barley tea from the kettle. They profess allegiance to their former commander but this also will prove hollow. The crippled officer rejects former love interest Seo Ae-ja who he feels unable to fullfill, leaving her to go with the U.S. soldiers whose Jeeps patrol the streets.

Attention irritatingly shifts among the characters. Her brothers share the crowded shanty town home with their crazy mother Jin Kyu Kim who keeps on waking up and demanding they all flee. One is her son Jin Kyu Kim, an accountant whose salary barely supports the family and won’t cover treatment for the bad teeth which make his life even more miserable, along with Jeong-suk Moon  his pregnant wife, a rebellious young son who sells papers on the street rather than go to school, and Mu-ryong Choi the other brother, a drunk and depressed wounded veteran who keeps on promising daughter Hye-ok a new pair of shoes, without delivering.

Aimless Bullet - Hye-ok & Mu-ryong Choi.

He moves to the center of attention when an old flame who works with a movie company gets him an acting job offer which he indignantly rejects after discovering his qualification is the war wounds they want him to show them. He, of course, smashes a glass door and spends the next scenes with a bandaged hand. 

 

 A new development is his surprise discovery of the officer nurse, who cared for him in military hospital, waiting at the other side of a level crossing as the train passes. She’s not doing too badly living in a flat at the top of iron stairs, keeping  a pistol to ward off a would-be poet admirer who moons about. Our hero and the ex nurse slide off the bed together.

This resolves over night with suicide and murder, as described by the elderly cage bird keeping caretaker. Mu-ryong Choi reads the love letter left him and takes the pistol, recruiting his would be actor former sergeant to drive a Jeep in the bank job he’s been obsessively planning.

Shots ring out. The driver takes off and our hero is pursued through a building site, exchanging bullets with the cops and dragging a sack full of bank notes, a handful of which his movie actress old flame ends clutching.

But no, there’s more - Jin Kyu Kim’s life threatening dentistry, complete with low angle spitting, a taxi ride from the University Hospital to the morgue and the police station with his anesthetized monologue about being an aimless bullet. Throw in one kid blowing bubbles and the son’s newspaper seller chums spreading the story in the morning edition.

Director and one time editor Hyun Mok Yoo’s film finally intrigues for it’s mix of styles and themes. It’s a companion piece to 'thirties Lost Generation movies like the Richard Barthlemess Last Flight and Heroes for Sale, along with the rubble settings of the forties  Irgendwo in Berlin and Hue and Cry. It has the languid defeatism (they called it alienation) of the then contemporary Antonioni, whose sharp exterior photography the film also emulates, all presenting a picture of post peninsular war Koreans caught in a hopeless spiral of poverty and depression - unemployment, bombed buildings, a hill of squatter shanties, construction sites and the presence of whore chasing U.S. troops.

The film was promptly banned by the incoming General Park Chung-hee government but in it's current restoration it is enjoying a  burst of high trendiness. We can see a fuzzy first version of more notable films - the gift promised the little girl in Hun Jang's 2017 Taeksi woonjunsa / A Taxi Driver  or the the poverty stricken family sharing their home in Bong jun-ho's better known 2019 Gisaengchung / Parasite.

The copy on You Tube is quite good and well sub-titled.

For context, I considered  Dae-jin Kang's Mabu / The Coachman, another Korean film from the same year with an outlook as gloomy as Aimless Bullet. It has status in its home market but proves much more routine.

Mabu / The Coachman

Titles superimposed on the turning wheel introduce Seung- Ho Kim  as  Mabu the horse cart driver facing multiple misfortunes. 

We kick off with his bike riding son chased through the streets as a thief. His mute daughter is beaten by her unfaithful husband. The older son has failed his law exams three times and his other daughter is being groomed to pick up businessmen.

The owner boss keeps on threatening to sell the horse that provides the family income. However his sympathetic housekeeper slips Mabu rice wine when the other drivers go off to drink from the tap. She fancies him.

Things (of course) get worse. The mute daughter commits suicide. The young son is brought back by the cops and triggers a self criticism to grandma’s picture in the yard. Then dad is involved in a traffic accident and gets no help from the boss.

Fortunately, his sympa son earns some money, beats up the daughter’s low life boy friend for slapping her and gets her a factory job. The house keeper buys the repossessed horse with her savings and gives it to them anonymously.

With his young brother back in school, the son takes over the horse cart and (best scene) the family gathers in the square to celebrate him finally passing the exam, complete with a track-in on dad and a crane shot of the family going down the street in the snow together.

The lab work is good and the handling routine-assured but the film making is otherwise undistinguished (one fuzzy white transition) and the writing and performance are from stock. Glimpses of Korean life are minimal - the society of the cab drivers gets very marginal treatment and the attachment to the horse is token.

That one could have come from any of the less developed Asian industries of its day. It offers maudlin sentimentality in place of Aimless Bullet's focused anguish.

Barrie Pattison 2021