The Price of Liberty

I watched this movie last night on DVD, and it was very good -- better than I expected, given Korean movies' increasing Hollywoodization. Which could mean that American audiences might like it! It's streaming on Amazon and Youtube and probably elsewhere, so chances are you can find it if you're interested. Korea has been in the US news more than usual lately, so Americans should take the opportunity to inform themselves. Besides, this is a good movie -- entertaining, well-made, and fairly accurate historically.

1987 is about the events that led to the fall of the military dictatorship in South Korea, set off by the murder by waterboarding of a student activist, Park Jong-chul.  A prosecutor blocked the coverup, the press ran with the story, and after huge protests all over the country, the government allowed open elections to take place. Still, it took several more years for something like democracy to be established, and as we saw with the recent plans by the military to save ex-President Park's regime by declaring martial law, it's still not safe. It never is, anywhere.

The film was directed by Jang Joon-hwan, whose Save the Green Planet! (2003) was a sort of science-fiction allegory of the persistence of South Korea's repressive past.  1987 is only his third feature. (I haven't yet seen his second, Hwayi: A Monster Boy [2013].)  It's a much more mainstream work than Green Planet, though still tricky in its structure -- not in ways that would confuse an audience, necessarily, but in the way the narrative keeps adding on characters who turn out to be surprisingly significant.  (According to Darcy Paquet of Koreanfilm.org, only one of the characters is entirely fictional.)  It's like watching a juggler keep adding objects to keep in the air.  For Korean audiences, it probably helped that numerous well-known actors played cameos; this was a prestige project, after all.  The screenwriter, Kim Kyung-chan, has one previous credit, Cart (2014), about a strike at a Korean big-box chain store, so he has experience handling political content involving a big cast of characters; I should watch Cart again to see how it compares.

The narrative circles back on itself, rhyming the killing of another student activist whose death galvanized the democracy movement even more, with Park Jong-chul's death, and culminates in a recreation of the huge protest marches that took place all over the country. This must have been a big budget production, given the thousands of extras who participated, the need to get costumes and hairstyles right, to find locations that looked like the 1980s in the 2010s. 1987 is a spectacular logistical achievement as well as good entertainment and a powerful history lesson.
My favorite scene, by the way, is when a young woman, played by Kim Tae-ri, gets caught up in a demonstration near her university, though she herself wasn't one of the activists. The police grab her, punch and club her, and start to drag her away -- but a handsome (of course) young activist rescues her. They run through the alleys trying to escape, and manage to frustrate the cops, one of whom is knocked out. The young woman starts to run, but then turns around to kick him in the head before she escapes with her new friend. (The cop she kicks is one of those who hit her earlier, by the way: he deserves it.)

Once again I'm impressed by the ability of South Korean filmmakers to make brave political movies about the recent past.  I can't think of any US films that come close, though I admit I've probably missed some, and I hear Rob Reiner's Shock and Awe, about the propaganda campaign legitimizing the US invasion of Iraq, is good.  The most famous US example might be Salt of the Earth, the 1954 independent film about striking miners that was suppressed by a McCarthyist campaign.  But could Hollywood make such a movie?  The usual Hollywood approach is to reduce political struggle to One Man (sometimes One Woman) who Makes a Stand, while ignoring the many people who actually make a movement.  It's a very American blind spot.  One reason I love South Korean cinema is that it shows that you can make exciting, entertaining movies and TV dramas that don't scant the importance of solidarity and collective action.  But you don't have to think about that when you watch 1987.  Just be shocked (by the brutality of the repression), awed (by the courage of the people who resisted it), and moved.