I’m “biast” (con): nothing
I have not read the source material
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) is a not-so-young man in Seoul who can’t seem to grow up. He’s got no job and he wants to be a writer but “I don’t know what to write yet.” (This… is not usually a problem writers have. Too many ideas: that’s the problem writers have.) One day he runs into Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jun), from his old farming community outside the city. She’s mean and manipulative but cute. And then, after he does her the enormous favor — cheeky of her to even ask this of him, frankly — of watching her cat while she travels to Africa for a few weeks, she arrives home with Ben (Steven Yeun) in tow.
Now, Ben is wealthy and handsome, where Jong-su is poor and plain, and ain’t that the way it always is: girls end up with the bad boys, the rich bastards. And Ben is bad: damn near the first thing he says to Jong-su is that he has never cried, and anyone watching Burning who has the dimmest clue about men and movies (and in real life) knows to take this as a signpost that Ben is a sociopath. Anyone who has the dimmest clue about men and movies (and in real life) knows to take Jong-su’s mooning to mean that he is IN LUUUVE with Hae-mi and is PUT OUT and unfairly treated by this turn of events. She may be mean and manipulative, and he may barely know her; but didn’t she did let him fuck her before she left for Africa? So what if Jong-su fumbled his way awkwardly through the encounter. Isn’t she supposed to be his now?
Oh hey Burning is The Nice Guy’s Complaint done up arthouse South Korean style, with gorgeous cinematography, an unsupportable runtime (two and a half hours), and a plot dragged out from a short story — “Barn Burning,” by Haruki Murakami — that is meant to render Jong-su’s unspoken existential lament as something deep and meaningful. It’s not. It’s the same old male-entitlement crap, only with subtitles and a veneer of consequence about it. There’s, like, a lot of METAPHOR here. Remember Hae-mi waxing rhapsodic over how the Bushman of the Kalahari talk about Little Hunger — the state of literally desiring food — and Great Hunger, or a hankering after the meaning of life? See what Burning did there? Jong-su’s frustrated horniness and thwarted (and perhaps purely hypothetical) creativity is significant.
And yet even as director and cowriter (with Jungmi Oh) Chang-dong Lee thinks he’s being subtle, so much is absurdly on the nose. “He’s the Great Gatsby,” Jong-su moans about Ben. Yes; yes, he is. “Aren’t all protagonists nuts?” someone says lightly; later we will start to wonder whether some of the dark turns Burning takes are all in Jong-su’s head, or maybe in the In Progress folder on his laptop; maybe he has found the story he wants to write? Maybe all the obvious clichés of Burning are merely the fever dreams of a talentless hack? (That’s not particularly intriguing or enlightening, though, either.)
Meanwhile, as Burning ponders the difference between rich men and poor ones, between smooth dudes and dorky nerds, Hae-mi is a nonentity, a diffuse object of the varying desires of Jong-su and Ben. She’s a manic pixie dream girl who dances topless in the sunset, because she’s a free spirit, or some shit. She is ridiculous and melodramatic and absurdly vulnerable: she falls asleep in public places, for one thing, and — unlike most women — appears to have no female friends whatsoever who might be concerned about the guys she’s hanging out, both of whom would be setting off alarm bells. (This is one thing men always get wrong about the female characters they write: women have fierce champions in their female friends. Not that no woman is ever lonely or friendless, but a woman like Hae-mi without female friends does not feel plausible.) In the eyes of this movie, she is to be protected, or she is to be victimized… and either Jong-su is fantasizing that she is being used and hurt by Ben, or she is really being used and hurt by Ben. Either way, whatever is happening to her is not about her, but about what she means to the men.
The performances here are really terrific — even if, in the case of Jong-seo Jun’s Hae-mi, the movie doesn’t really care about her — and the film does look beautiful. But to what end? Burning has nothing fresh or compelling to say about men’s anger or men’s sadness or men’s feelings of any kind. It merely pretends that yet another depiction of obsessive, unwarranted sexual jealousy on the part of man is somehow noteworthy.
Hi. 90% of this review is negative, and the very last paragraph only commends the acting and cinematography; how did this not get the red light it sounds like it deserves? Nymphomaniac was unenlightening and uninsightful (with amazing acting); am quite confused.
I’ve been reading other interpretations of the film and I’d like to ask you if you detected the same thing; SPOILERS.
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It’s been said that both men are the same person and that Ben is basically a mirror-image of Jong-su (complete opposites) and that the whole “traveling to Africa” and “burning a greenhouse” every month is a metaphor for being a serial killer. He kills every 2 months and picks girls who will not be missed by their families aka abandoned greenhouses. And when he was in Ben’s apartment; that drawer in the medicine cabinet contained all the tokens he had taken from all his proper victims. Burning greenhouses = killing girls, which he has done before. Him killing Ben was him killing his serial killer urges until the next time he years to kill.
So w/ regard to your review, Hae-mi not having any friends is sort of why he was targeting her. To be honest I was so confused walking out of this film… still trying to wrap my head around it.
This simply didn’t hit me as quite as awful as *Nymphomaniac.* You should take my traffic light and star ratings as part of the review: ie, it has all these issues, but the yellow light indicates that it doesn’t quite sink to the level of “completely irredeemable.”
POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOLLOW
I don’t see that AT ALL.
That’s not even metaphor. It would appear to be the actual text.
On the other hand, I don’t see how “traveling to Africa” can be a metaphor for serial murder because Hae-mi does that as well.
Yes, absolutely. But again: not metaphor. It’s what is actually happening. (Unless these are “merely” trophies from Ben’s sexual conquests. It’s possible that Ben is a complete asshole but not actually a serial killer. That’s sort of tough to justify with the cat and Hae-mi’s cleaned-up apartment, but not 100 percent impossible.)
Or he didn’t actually kill Ben but just fantasized about it.
Apparently the first rule of Nice Guy Club is “don’t talk about Nice Guy Club”. And the second rule of Nice Guy Club is…
Nice Guys really shouldn’t complain.
Dumb radical feminist hag. Stick to shitty romantic comedies or dumb feminist shit. Radical feminists shoul never review movies.- A proud man and anti feminist. Men should not cry. Men are strong and masculine, women are feminine and submissive. Radical feminism goes against the very nature of women.
You seem great.
LOL. You often crack me up in your responses to trollish posters. thanks!
Steve… you’re not a Nice Guy. I don’t think you’re even a guy, just some troll looking for someone to mock you so you’d be the martyr to your “Hate the fems” world-view. So, congrats on getting mocked. You must be… so thrilled.
I suppose “that sexy bad boy is probably a serial killer” might be a better message than “only sexy bad boys know how to keep women in their place, and nice guys are helpless before them” – but that still raises the question of why this film reminds me so much of Ex Machina. Different flavours of male panic?
Haha! Yes, it’s *Ex Machina* all over again.
Murakami is one of the authors I use as a litmus test (a shitty thing to do, but I do it, maybe some of you have a litmus test to weed out people who use litmus tests, that’s cool), specifically 1Q84, a well-written, meandering, meaningless author-insert male fantasy with two of the most cardboard, tone-deaf female characters I’ve read in any story, including fan fiction. Admittedly, the book is divisive among his fans, but even in his “better” work, the female characters are typically flat ciphers (stylized archetypes, some might charitably say) jerked around by the dictates of the plot with little believable agency.
The dude literally (literally literally) wrote a collection of stories called Men Without Women, in which a bunch of men make delicate observations and think deep thoughts about the women in their lives who are absent or dead. He’s a poster child for all the aspects of Japanese culture that I dislike. The most horrible thing is that the guy is a fantastic writer who can make mundane details feel uniquely beautiful, mysterious, and alive with meaning. What a fucking waste – reading his work is like standing with your nose pressed against a gorgeous, meticulously crafted portrait of a puddle of sewage and slowly walking backwards. Some of that is a reflection, but most of it is what’s actually on the other side of the glass.
Long story short, “Beautiful with nothing to say,” and “Women are mysterious fuckdolls,” should be the taglines for everything associated with Murakami including, if this review is any indication, this film. If anyone reading this loves Murakami’s work and this movie, please please explain what you find appealing about them.
Interesting! So the problems with the film maybe present in the short story it’s based on, and not stuff the director brought into it.
And yet as I noted on the It thread, directors change details all the time when they adapt novels — and undoubtedly, short stories — for the movies. They did it with the work of Leo Tolstoy. They did it with the work of Stephen King. They did it with the work of Robert Heinlein. I highly doubt they made an exception with the work of
Haruki Murakami.
But then you know this so please pardon me for being Captain Obvious here.
amanohyo isn’t talking about details, but about theme and attitude.
“Women are mysterious fuckdolls”…haha! SO. TRUE. I mean, I’m with you. I love the beauty and weirdness of Murakami’s prose, but yeah, his female characters all basically function as “cum dumpsters” for the male characters. It’s the classic “women aren’t really human” trope that persists to this day across a wide swath of world literature and other media. It’s depressing, but not surprising.
I’ve watched an embarrassingly high number of Korean soap operas (aka KDramas) and I’m a fan of Steven Yuen (sad he had to go to Korea to get a leading man role, but that’s a complaint for another day), so I got quite excited when I read about this movie. Additionally, I’ve read the original Murakami short story upon which this movie is based. Note: I haven’t seen the movie yet, but am planning on it. I have some preliminary thoughts, which square with your review: 1) Korean society (well, OK, East Asian societies generally) is sexist as hell so the sexism you mention is pretty par for the course. 2) You are absolutely correct that a Korean woman like the protagonist would TOTALLY have female friends unless, of course, she’s just a cipher, which is clearly the case here. 3) The Murakami story “Barn Burning” was meh for me. As another poster noted, the female character functions purely a conduit for the two male characters to meet. As far as the rich/poor divide goes, that’s quite a preoccupation in Korean culture (Google “chaebol” for an explanation), so it makes sense that that aspect of the story was emphasized in this Korean version. But both Japanese and Korean (and Chinese) cultures are very hierarchical, patriarchal cultures and pretty deeply sexist and needless to say, quite homophobic as well). So how do you get two straight men to have deeply intimate conversations with each other? You use a woman as the go-between (like human lube. Ew.). This was also the case in Y Tu Mama Tambien, as I recall, but at least that movie took the homosocial bonding to its obvious conclusion. In any event, I still want to see this film, if only to see if it matches up to my impressions of the original story, but yeah, nothing in your review suggests it adds much to the original story and most of the flaws stem from the original story, which wasn’t–for me–as deep as perhaps Murakami wanted it to be.
The sexism of this movie looks exactly like the sexism of the West!
There isn’t even any homosocial bonding between the two men in this movie, though.
Pointing out the sexism I’ve noticed in Korean cinema doesn’t mean the West doesn’t suffer from sexism. I’m just suggesting that Korea has its own particular brand of it. More recent Kdramas are beginning to address women’s issues and sexism in their society. But yes, the West isn’t more enlightened (as any survey of recent news would suggest) in terms of sexism, just different. As for the homosocial bonding, I was referring to the original short story. The real relationship in the the Murakami story is the relationship between the men and the woman is just the means by which they meet, in my opinion.
I doubt you’d read this still, but I am deeply offended by this review. I have seen from many western critics this interpretation that the film has something to do with class conflict or masculinity. It is understandable because of how common these themes are in the west, and also because when people learn that it is based on the Murakami story it leads them awry as to what the film is really based on.
Burning is actually a deeply Korean film that echoes what is considered the first modern Korean novel ‘Mujong’ (Heartless) by Yi Kwang-su. ‘Mujong’ is centered around a love triangle as well. In the novel there is one male and two females, one female represents the history of Korea (tradition) and carries what is called “han,” (han is an untranslatable Korean word basically meaning carrying deep shame/regret/sadness over inherited history) while the other represents modernity. The love triangle in Burning represents the same thing. Ben represents not wealth, but modernity, this is why he has an American name, and why he is lighter skinned, while Jong-su represents tradition, he carries “han” and histories he can’t control loom over him, from the North Korean propaganda he can hear from his house, to his father who burdens him.
The film, through this love triangle, means to represent the struggle of Korean identity, after having undergone fascism, colonialism, and being divided into northern and southern regions. This is a tugging between tradition and modernity, where modernity arguably wins, and swallows Korea.
It is very rare for Korean art to reach so far in the world, so I have found it deeply disappointing that through a superficial, western feminist lens this film has been considered in the way it has. Especially since the film has a very leftist position, Ben is an embodiment of colorism and Koreans making themselves intentionally lighter-skinned, it is also intentional that Hae-mi points out she got plastic surgery at the beginning of the film, and how her job (dancing around and doing those raffles) is an objectification of the female body, objectification which is rampant in modern Korean culture.
This review comes from an ignorance of the Korean history which is absolutely necessary to understand the film, and in certain aspects, comes with ignorance not excusable by cultural difference.
Apologies for my English.
No, Korean history is necessary to understand *your interpretation* of the film.
All stories are open to multiple interpretations. I am not Korean, so how am I supposed to approach the film as a Korean person would? I cannot do that. And I have no interest in trying to imagine how a Korean person would react to it. I suspect you’d be just as offended if I’d attempted that.
I readily admit I know next to nothing about Korean culture or Korean history. But that is true of most people in the UK and the US, who make up the bulk of my readers, and in which regions this film was released. Maybe your beef is with the film’s distributor for releasing the film in places where the audience will lack the qualifications you think are required.
Ah, so, this is yet another example, then, of a male filmmaker who thinks he is critiquing misogyny but is in fact actively engaging in it.
Your review has absolutely no merit whatsoever, everything you write about misogyny in the movie could be applied to almost any love triangle films or stories. Structural feminist, or generally structural analysis provides nothing for film criticism. This review is just redundant white noise on a film you have nothing interesting to say about. Your reactive structural critiques ironically echo conservative rather than progressive points of view. Bechdel tests, representation criterium, and checklists are great at making an uninteresting, shallow film criticism.
About the history of Korea, this is a dull point you have made. It is as if a person unfamiliar with American history or politics could write an insightful criticism of a film like Lincoln, for example. The film takes prerequisite knowledge for granted, as does Burning. Of course you may have an interpretation / impression. But not one that should prompt this attempt at film criticism, when you are so unfamiliar with the context of the film.
On your last point, there is no way to represent misogyny in a visual medium without showcasing feminine sexuality. Many (mostly western) corporate McFeminist films make women more masculine to be empowering, ironically enforcing the masculine / feminine binary that favors masculinity. Showcasing powerful femininity is the only way to subvert this binary. Otherwise, women will be treated with the message that masculinity is power, and to be powerful, they must be more like men.
White, first-world “feminism” was a mistake.
I’m not sure that’s true, but if it was, how would it negate what I wrote?
Then go find your criticism elsewhere.
If *Lincoln* was/were released in Korea, I would expect a Korean critic to analyze it from a Korean perspective for Korean audiences. I don’t see how this is a difficult concept to grasp.
Says you. And you would be wrong about this.
Go fuck yourself.
Elsewhere on the site, MaryAnn just posted a link to this essay:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/opinion/we-need-more-critics-of-color.html
It’s very helpful to hear a response to this film from someone familiar with Korean culture.
It’s also helpful to hear a response to the portrayal of women in the film from a female critic who’s been writing about sexism in movies for decades.
We all have our areas of expertise, and we all have cultural blind spots. Websites like FlickFilosopher can provide a space where people from all sorts of different backgrounds have a chance to share their perspectives, as long as we’re willing to genuinely listen to each other.