Joint Security Area

(2000)

Directed by: Park Chan-Wook Starring: Song Kang-Ho, Lee Byung-Heon, Lee Young-Ae 110 minutes, 35mm in Korean with English subtitles "The basic plotline of this pungent military drama...comes tightly tailored in the Hollywood style. Its interior, by contrast, is airy, subtle and playful, and showcases the best elements of modern Asian cinema." - Xan Brooks, The London Guardian

JOINT SECURITY AREA is a bizarrely proportioned movie. The biggest movie ever released in Korea (beating the previous box office record of every film, both foreign and domestic), sold for the highest price ever to Japan, opening at the top of the box office on its opening weekend there, filmed on the biggest and most expensive set ever built in Korea (an 80% replica of the Panmunjom truce village), and generally the BIGGEST! MOST EXPENSIVE! MOST! SUPER! ENORMOUS! HIT! in Korea, this stratospheric success is built around an intimate, character-driven drama that telescopes the psychic damage wrought by the entire Cold War into the lives of five, small people. JOINT SECURITY AREA is the APOCALYPSE NOW of the Korean War ­ a shimmering, hyper-real epic that charts the spiritual fallout of international politics. The war itself is too big and too tragic - there's no way to get a handle on it, no place to start. But the sorry aftermath is a way in, and JSA uses the partition, the arbitrary line drawn down the middle of the country and manned by international oversight, as a door into the psychological wreckage of the Korean War. A mystery wrapped in a conundrum, the movie starts with a present-day incident on the border that leaves a group of North and South Korean soldiers alternately wounded or dead. The Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC) swoops in to investigate, led by Korean-Swiss Major Sophie Jean (Lee Young-Ae) and the stark, technocratic investigation becomes the frame for a series of extended flashbacks that depict the events leading up to the shooting. Starring Song Kang-Ho (who won mutiple awards for his acting here, and who stars in THE FOUL KING) and Lee Byung-Heon, the flashbacks are airy and light, whereas the investigation is heavy and claustrophobic. Intensely human, occasionally hilarious, and gorgeously shot in Super-35mm, the flashbacks depict military life along the border; a life of constant tedium punctuated with absurd alerts, and pointless exercises and manoevres. Like two countries playing make-believe, North and South Korea sit on either side of their border (sometimes mere inches from one another) acting like tough guys, rushing their troops around, and painting each other as capitalist toadies and blood-sucking communists, respectively. The Cold War is an embarrassment, a time when the US and the USSR tricked everyone into a collective delusion, and now that we've woken up we're left with a headache. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, North Korea stands as the sole hangover from this embarrassing global episode, and if you look at it for too long your eyes begin to hurt. The politics that created it are an affront to human decency. And maybe it's this wound, this scar across their country, that gives some Korean directors the ability to evoke longing and loss not as airy, intangible feelings of "oo, I should have done that," but as visceral slugs in the gut. In every sense of the word, JSA is a tragedy. But at the same time, it's a testament to human nature, not the cheap, sentimental Hallmark card version of human nature, but the human nature where, in the teeth of global politics, even in the face of extinction, like reaches out to like, and friendships are formed because we're humans, not ideologues. In America, where blockbusters have to be action spectacles, there's something uniquely satisfying in a major motion picture that bases its plot not on colliding asteroids or digital dinosaurs, but on the triumphs and failures of five ordinary people. Awards: Winner, Best Picture, Best Actor (Song Kang-Ho), Best Art Direction (Kim Sang-Man),the 38th Grand Bell Awards. Winner, Audience Award, Best Picture, Best Actor (Song Kang-Ho), Deauville Asian Film Festival. Winner, Best Cinematography, Kim Seong-Bok, 21st Chongryong Awards Runner-Up, Best Picture, Seattle International Film Festival.

Director Park Chan-Wook's note: "The division of the Korean peninsula is not a tragedy; it is an irony. The stress and heightened reactions of soldiers at Panmunjom are so poignant that they are sometimes laughable. But sudden gunfire is no laughing matter. My aim was not to make a film commercializing the subject of national division. Nor did I want to offer a lesson on the subject. My film opens with puzzlement and ends on a note of melancholy, quite like the succession of feelings my generation is coping with when contemplating the situation. I would hope my film stimulates a new perspective on the national division, through the eyes of individual human beings rather than from the high ground of political ideology. By exposing the system of duplicity that seeks to preserve peace by concealing truth, I would hope that JOINT SECURITY AREA would demonstrate how ideology drives individuals to catastrophe. My aim was to reveal the true meaning of national division as it is felt in the hearts of Korean people. And most importantly to communicate those feelings to the younger generation of South Koreans who have little contact with the emotions of the older generation who lived through the ordeal of separation."

Production Notes As it was impossible to shoot the film at the Joint Security Area, the production team chose to build what became the largest ever-constructed outdoor set in Korea. It covered some 26,000 square meters and reproduced the central buildings of Panmunjom as well as the "Bridge of No Return," where in 1953 thousands of North and South Korean prisoners of war were repatriated to each side and both South and North Korean guard posts adjacent to the bridge. About 60% of the filming took place on the set, which was constructed in a southern Chunchong province. JSA was also the first film in Korea to be shot on Super 35mm. Production was completed in May of 2000 and the film was released in Korea in September of 2000. JSA went on to become the most successful ever in the history of Korean cinema.