M  (Korea, 2007)
Directed by: Lee Myung-Se
Starring: Jang Dong-Won, Gong Hyo-Jin, Lee Yeon-Hee
“Viewers posting on the internet have called Lee a ‘swindler’ for disguising a very personal, idiosyncratic film in such commercial trappings.”
- KoreanFilm.org

This hallucinatory, necrophiliac romance is the closest you’re ever going to come to dreaming with your eyes open. Min-Woo (mega-star cutie pie Jang Dong-Won) is a novelist who has spent his career writing trendy best-sellers but he’s finally taken one advance too many: the deadline for the new book was yesterday and he hasn’t written a word. He also just moved in with his girlfriend, Eun-Hye (Gong Hyo-Jin) whose rich, protective daddy has bought them an apartment. To top it all off he can’t sleep, he’s prone to sudden rages and he seems to be on the verge of a full-blown nervous breakdown. Enter Mi-Mi (Lee Yeon-Hee) his high school sweetheart who may be a ghost from his past, or she may literally be a ghost – to Director Lee, memories and ghosts are one and the same. In M, the movie theater becomes a seance chamber, where we sit in the dark and summon up the dead memories who scratch at the other side of the screen, trying to connect with us. This is a movie where cigarettes are joss sticks, reflections are doorways to other worlds and bars are where the living and the dead can have a drink together.

Lee Myung-Se has long been a favorite of the New York Asian Film Festival, from his sizzling study in cops and robbers propulsion, NOWHERE TO HIDE (1999), which was all about motion; to his swordplay romance, DUELIST, which was all about color. Now comes M, which is all about dreams and dreaming, told through the near-experimental use of editing and light. Director Lee loves comic books and crime novels too much to want to make art films, but he enjoys luring audiences into the movie theater expecting to get one thing (ghost story) and then giving them something completely different (dream movie). This kind of artistic bait and switch is par for the course for a man who spent several years watching hundreds of films from all over the world and developed a grand theory of cinema: "Movies are movies." 

M is a map of a dream and there's no movie that recreates the sense of dreaming with your eyes open quite as stunningly. At the end of the film we see two of the characters on a vacation and it looks like everything is just fine - they've woken up. But look carefully at the screen, there are plenty of clues lurking in the edges that we're still trapped in a dream, and maybe that's what life is: a series of dreams where we're all trapped, living and dead, past and present. For Director Lee, movies are organic, they live and die, they change and grow. He directs as much from his dreams and subconscious as he directs from storyboards and a script, filling his movies with clues that contradict and undercut their story, but that imbue them with a deeper richness. M shows us what happens when a director cracks his skull open and photographs the dreams that escape, like wisps of smoke. And it has inspired extreme passions: many Koreans despised it when it was released, but fans staged a street protest to keep it in theaters, and some have seen it dozens of times.