JOINT SECURITY AREA (2000)
Directed by: Park Chan-Wook
Starring: Song Kang-Ho, Lee Byung-Heon, Lee Young-Ae
Winner, Best Picture, Best Actor (Song Kang-Ho), Best Art Direction (Kim Sang-Man), the 38th Grand Bell Awards
Winner, Audience Award, Best Picture, Best Actor (Song Kang-Ho), Deauville Asian Film Festival
Winner, Best Cinematography, Kim Seong-Bok, 21st Chongryong Awards
Runner-Up, Best Picture, Seattle International Film Festival
Joint Security Area is a bizarrely proportioned movie. The biggest film ever released in Korea (beating the previous box office record of every film, both foreign and domestic), sold for the highest price ever to Japan, opening at the top of the box office on its opening weekend, filmed on the biggest and most expensive set ever built in Korea (an 80% replica of the Panmunjom truce village), and generally the BIGGEST! MOST EXPENSIVE! MOST! SUPER! ENORMOUS! HIT!, all this stratospheric success is built around an intimate, character-driven drama that telescopes the psychic damage wrought by the entire Cold War into the lives of five small people.
Joint Security Area is the Apocalypse Now of the Korean War — a shimmering, hyper-real epic that charts the spiritual fallout of international politics. The war itself is too big and too tragic to get a handle on, there’s no easy place to start. But the sorry aftermath is a way in, and JSA uses the partition, the arbitrary line drawn down the middle of the country and manned by international oversight, as a door into the psychological wreckage of the War. A mystery wrapped in a conundrum, the movie starts with a present-day incident on the border that leaves a group of North and South Korean soldiers alternately wounded or dead.
The Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC) swoops in to investigate, led by Korean-Swiss Major Sophie Jean (Lee Young-Ae) and the stark, technocratic investigation becomes the frame for a series of extended flashbacks that depict the events leading up to the shooting. Starring Song Kang-Ho (who won mutiple awards for his acting here, and who rocketed to fame in Korea with his roles in The Quiet Family, The Foul King, and then JSA) and Lee Byung-Heon, the flashbacks are airy and light, whereas the investigation is heavy and claustrophobic. Intensely human, occasionally hilarious, and gorgeously shot in Super-35mm, the flashbacks depict military life along the border; a life of constant tedium punctuated with absurd alerts, pointless exercises and manoeuvres. Like two countries playing make-believe, North and South Korea sit on either side of their border (sometimes mere inches from one another) acting like tough guys, rushing their troops around, and painting each other as capitalist toadies and blood-sucking communists, respectively.
The Cold War is an embarrassment, a time when the US and the USSR tricked the world into a collective delusion, and now that we've woken up we're left with a morning after headache. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, North Korea stands as the sole hangover from this embarrassing global episode, and if you look at it for too long your eyes begin to ache. The politics that created it are an affront to human decency. And maybe it's this wound, this scar across their country, that gives some Korean directors the ability to evoke longing and loss not as airy, intangible feelings of "Oo, maybe I should have done that," but as visceral slugs to the gut.
In every sense of the word, JSA is a tragedy, but at the same time it’s a testament to human nature, not the cheap, sentimental Hallmark card version of human nature, but the human nature where, in the teeth of global politics, even in the face of extinction, like reaches out to like, and friendships are formed because we’re humans, not ideologues. In America, where blockbusters have to be action spectacles, there’s something uniquely satisfying in a major motion picture that bases its plot not on colliding asteroids or digital dinosaurs, but on the triumphs and failures of five ordinary people.