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| AFRIKA. Starring - Lee Yo-Won - Kim Min-Sun - Lee Young-Jin - Jo Eun-Ji. Director - Shin Sung Soo. 2001. Ji Won and So Hyun are having a pretty miserable week so together decide to take a short break away. So Hyun asks her boyfriend Young-Bae to help find her a car for the occasion, for which he duly obliges. This is going to be a bizarre trip though after So Hyun discovers a pair of guns laid in the back of the car. Things begin to spiral out of control though for the girls after the guns start to consume their lives, and the lives of those around them. What starts as a matter of self-defence soon instils a confidence in the pair that thrusts them forwards towards the inevitable. Things get messy for the girls after their new found notoriety attracts the attentions of a couple of unwanted recruits who do nothing but make the situation worse as their own unwanted ideals far outweigh those of theirs. All they want to do is get back to Seoul and forget any of this ever happened but this isn’t going to be easy as not only the S.Korean police are looking for them but also the owners of the guns themselves, and they have a lot more to lose. I found Afrika to be a real breath of fresh air and something of a surprise for me, looking at the cover you can be forgiven for thinking that this movie is going to be a stylish gangster movie, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. At the heart is a really good comedy that is very subtle and extremely funny but bubbling beneath the surface is a statement on the gun situation in S.Korea. I am not a political genius and do not profess to know too much about my own countries political agendas let alone that of a country who my only knowledge of comes from movies, but this seems to stem from the instability with the N.Koreans. It is as though the countries are so uneasy with each other that any glimpse of a gun is immediately blamed on their neighbours. I could be reading a little too much into this though, but it really did make me think. After all where I am from and surely any British or US citizen can attest to this, guns are a thing to be afraid of, not a thing of power and prestige as is often suggested for the most part in this movie. This situation is briefly addressed in the latter stages but only briefly. Afrika as I said feels very fresh, there is a kind of naivety shown not only in the girls’ characters but also in the girls themselves. They don’t instantly look at home in front of the camera but there is so much enthusiasm shown that it just doesn’t matter, and I liked this a lot. Some others have found all this naivety and bubblieness to be an irritation, whereas I found this to be a nice distraction from the overly ego conscious efforts that generally spew forth from any movie with a gun in it. I must also make a mention of the bumbling owners of the guns, these three buffoons are real class to watch and you could make a movie surrounding these guys alone. I especially loved the way the gangster berated and beat down his bitch at every opportunity, maybe my own desires are surfacing here but why cant we all have a lil’ bitch to smackdown every time things don’t go our way. Whilst not being a technical masterpiece Afrika moves at a fairly swift pace and is edited and shot competently (apart from the longest pan around scene ever witnessed), this does have it’s downside though as I would have liked to see a little deeper into the girls characters and to why they felt desperate enough to continue on with this power trip. I wasn’t however too impressed with the ending either, I am trying not to give too much away but I cannot credibly believe that any country in the world would let a situation like this just drop. All in all Afrika is a movie well worth a watch, if you like your gangster fliks gritty and hard then you will probably hate this title, but if like me you have seen just one too many gritty dramas of late then this is an ideal distraction. 6******stars. |
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