An extra day in February means an extra February foreign film. You’ll have to just trust that I watched this one in February even though I’m posting it on the first of March.
And we’re ending things with the Korean film Burning, which based on a Japanese short story by Haruki Murakami called “Barn Burning.” I’m a pretty big Murakami fan, and his short story collection The Elephant Vanishes (which includes this short story) is one of my favorite of his books. So of course I was intrigued by this film and excited to round out the first ever February Foreign Films series with this one.
But right before I started the movie, I noticed the run time, which is around two and a half hours. Two and a half hours for a short story that is only a few pages long. How were they going to expand the materials to make it take up so much time?
Well… some minor spoilers to follow.
Even though this film changes the story’s setting from Japan to Korea, a lot of the hallmarks of a Murakami story remain. There’s a potentially invisible elusive cat, jazz music, references to American pop culture, just a touch of surrealism, and of course what Murakami story would be complete without a Murakami girl?
The Murakami girl is, in a sense, the author’s unique take on the manic pixie dream girl trope. She’s quirky and fun. She’s bubbly and sees the world just a little bit differently than everyone else, especially our brooding young male protagonist. But what makes a Murakami girl different from a manic pixie dream girl is the way she complicates the protagonist’s life rather than fixing it or helping him grow in some way. A Murakami girl eludes to a stormy existence underneath her happy exterior. She might smile, but there is a great sadness underneath her smile that the protagonist can never quite understand or reach. She’s emotional. She has her own problems, although we’ll never quite get what they are.
At the end of the day, rather than helping the brooding male protagonist better himself or grow up as a manic pixie dream girl would, the Murakami girl destroys some part of the protagonist. After one meets a Murakami girl, one is damaged forever and can never go back to the innocence they had before. She is alluring but essentially unknowable for one reason or another.
Hae-mi (played by Jeon Jong-seo) is a classic Murakami girl. She studies pantomime, gives her cat a quirky name (Boil), dances topless when she gets high, and flirts mercilessly with our protagonist Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) and our pseudo-villain Ben (Steven Yeun). She also cries at the thought of a sunset and ultimately is what drives Jong-su to madness.
The sections of the movie that feel the most Murakami are the moments that work best. If you read the linked short story above, most of the important details are found in the movie as well. A girl comes back from Africa with a new boyfriend she met there. Our protagonist is intrigued and slightly untrusting of this new man in his friend’s life. When the men are alone, the boyfriend confesses that he burns barns that he judges to be expendable. Our protagonists asks how he gets to be the one who judges what is expendable and what isn’t. The guy basically shrugs it off. He says the next barn he’s going to burn is very close by.
Our protagonist then spends the next few weeks trying to find the barn the guy ended up burning. Shortly after, the girl goes missing. When he asks the guy about it, he shrugs it off. The ending is ambiguous but we’re left wondering how this guy might have been involved in the girl’s disappearance.
The film, however, gets a lot more explicit. It’s not a short story. And in movie terms, it’s on the longer side. Because of this, I think the creators felt pressured to make a less ambiguous, more final, type of ending. For me, this is where this movie lost the plot entirely. I don’t want to give away what direction the movie take the story from there, but it did make me wonder if the script writers understood the meaning of Murakami’s work at all.
I also felt like there was no reason this movie needed to be as long as it was. It felt very stretched, and while a lot of critics seemed to have enjoyed the slow pace of this movie, I found it entirely unnecessary. A story like this could have been told in an hour and a half. Yes, I’m saying they should have shaved an entire hour off of this movie.
Also… this will come as no surprise to anyone. This movie needed more of the cat Boil in it. In the first part of the movie, Jong-su is meant to be taking care of Hae-mi’s cat Boil, and yet at no point do we see Boil during these feedings. I began to think I was being punked. I chose this movie for two reasons and two reasons only: 1) It’s based on a Murakami story and 2) I was promised a cat. Thankfully, Boil showed up in the last act of the film, but it almost felt like too little too late. And before you go to the comments to explain to me why we don’t see Boil earlier (for story-telling reasons), I get all that. And I don’t care. This movie was slow and very little happened, so the least they could do was give me a cat.
Apparently people are loving this movie as it is 95% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but if you want my opinion, I would skip the movie and read The Elephant Vanishes instead. And if you want a Murakami movie with a little more going on, try 2012’s Norwegian Wood, which also, of course, features a classic Murakami girl. Two of them, actually.
Thanks for joining me for February Foreign Films this month! It’s been a blast.