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Art as cultural legacy, as emotional accumulation: "You must suffer before you can become a great musician," declares the intransigent reciter, echoing Schumann. The artist (Kim Myung-gon) practices pansori, the traditional Korean folk-song which, between the Japanese hymns of the occupation and the Western pop of the liberation, has a difficult time in modern days. A friend suggests calligraphy as the form of the future, but the singer insists on his vanishing aesthetic, demoted as it is to sparse presentations and sideshow hawking. In his traveling troupe are daughter (Oh Jung-hae) and adopted son (Kim Kyu-chul), both give their throats a workout but only the girl has forceful vocals, the lad fumbles at the drum until he receives a harmonizing metaphor ("Level the road so the vehicle can pass"). Im Kwon-taek envisions pansori as galvanic eruptions of bliss and sorrow, timing one impromptu performance to a long take of the trio making their way down a sloping dirt road, magically modulating a static shot from wide landscape to open-air proscenium. (Another performance is interrupted by a band, whisking away the audience by playing a discombobulated "Besame Mucho.") The medium would later stand in for filmmaking (and film-watching) in Chunhyang, here Im offers it as a vigorous cultural institution that, on the verge of becoming a memory, navigates family through national upheaval. Transcendence doesn't come easy—the heroine dreams of performing the eponymous wrenching number but her pansori is too light, she practices to a breathtaking snowy landscape yet hasn't endured enough to express it. Blindness figures in the Mizoguchian conclusion, a culmination of the idea that music without the lived emotion to back it up is "only a mastery of sound."
--- Fernando F. Croce |