Burning
★★★★★
Thursday, Jan. 17 & Friday, Jan. 18, 7 p.m., free
The Rubenstein Arts Center, Durham
Aguably the most consequential entry at Cannes despite getting snubbed, Lee Chang-dong’s must-see film Burning has two free screenings at The Ruby this week in Duke’s Screen/Society series. Provocative and enigmatic, it’s one of the first great films of our strange new era, when formerly repressed social divisions are out in the open for all to see, yet it’s still difficult to imagine what might replace the old neoliberal order.
Chang-dong’s script uses Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning” as scaffolding for a narrative that combines the dramatic intimacy of a thriller with the expansive scope of an epic. Set between cosmopolitan Seoul and the rural outskirts of Paju, a border town mere miles from North Korea, Burning’s perspective is fixed to Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a farmer’s son with dreams of becoming a novelist. While working a delivery job in Seoul, he runs into an old schoolmate, Haemi (Jeon Jong-seo in her debut performance). After a brief affair, she spontaneously takes off for Africa, leaving him to care for a cat we never see while longing for her return.
The first part of the film is a portrait of Jong-su’s existential malaise, which encompasses his entire surroundings. Failure seems to follow him like a cloud—failure to rally community support for his father’s legal troubles, to make money in Seoul, to write. Yoo plays him with a permanent expression of confused anguish, embodying the mood of a young generation facing economic dead ends, who can’t imagine a future in which they matter. Chang-dong shoots Paju’s rugged, beautiful landscape predominantly at sunrise or sunset: not just Jong-su but the whole world is locked in endless transition.
Eventually, Haemi returns with a new boyfriend, Ben (Steven Yeun), who is Jong-su’s opposite: smooth, rich, and worldly. When Jong-su asks what he does for a living, Ben deftly deflects: “For me, work and play are the same.” Known in the U.S. for his roles in The Walking Dead and Sorry to Bother You, Yeun is pitch-perfect, smug with a faint hint of sociopathy. Just as Jong-su can’t fathom how Ben exists, he can’t understand the nature of Ben and Haemi’s relationship or why they’re so fascinated by him. Ben’s revelation of a very strange criminal secret halfway through the film only compounds these mysteries. Through it all, Jong-su’s frustrations cross over into suspicion, then obsession.
Burning has been praised for its expression of class rage (Trump even has a cameo via Jong-su’s TV), but Chang-dong’s most impressive accomplishment is the film’s strange temporality. With no clear ends in sight, only questions, suspense permeates everything, and reality imperceptibly blurs with fantasy. This captures something fundamental about the present, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to Burning in the years to come.
Stop calling him Chang-dong. Such a pain in the eye that show’s the author’s ignorance of East Asian cultures.