Skip to Content

Dispatch from the LA Film Fest 2015: A Midsummer’s Fantasia (Han-yeo-reu-mui Pan-ta-ji-a)

Dispatch from the LA Film Fest 2015: A Midsummer’s Fantasia (Han-yeo-reu-mui Pan-ta-ji-a)

midsummer1

Jang Kun-jae’s third feature is an unusual project, comparable in recent memory only to Miguel Gomes’ singular Our Beloved Month of August (2008), in that it is divided into two distinct halves, the first with an overriding documentary feel, the second using actors from the first to narrate a fiction.

The film takes place in the near-abandoned village of Gojō in the Nara Prefecture of south-central Japan. A young Korean film-maker (Im Hyeong-gook) is visiting with his interpreter (Kim Se-byeok) to research the area and interview locals, and the film’s opening is straight documentary, with credits rolling over a long-held, static shot of a barely-bustling café full of old people, followed by a table interview with the proprietors. The film style adheres closer to something one might wish to call typical east-Asian slow narrative fiction thereafter, however, with lengthy, static shots of people talking, or thinking, frequently with their back to the camera. In the film’s first half these are interspersed with further documentary-style interviews, distinguished by an unselfconscious use of jump cuts in the monologues, although others are played out before the dramatist’s cameras, as Im and Kim talk with various non-acting locals of the region, and we learn from them something of its history and current character (all the young people have left and the school has been closed for twenty years), just as Jang himself did, making his own research.

The exception is the young civil servant (Iwase Ryo) who is to act as their initial guide, although he too gets to tell his story, in a more intimate scene than those with the locals. As a character, therefore, with a constructed back-story (young and good-looking too, as the Im points out), and as an outsider with something (mildly) unexpected to say, rather than primarily being source of information about the place, he seems to interest Im the most, who regrets not having probed him further. Their second guide, however, provides an anecdote that affects the film-maker more profoundly than he realizes at first – the onscreen title of Chapter 1 is “First Love, Yoshiko”, the local man’s lost schooldays’ sweetheart, who provides a direct inspiration for the second part of the film.

midsummer2

The first chapter is shot in rather lovely, simple black and white (by Fujii Masayuki); but when Im awakes from an eerie dream, and steps to his window to observe the local festival fireworks, they blossom into lovely color. It’s a neat transition, not as sly as Gomes’, but no less elegant, and Jang eliminates any confusion with a chapter title – “The Well Of Sakura” ­– and an unexpected near-360° pan as a young woman, newly arrived in Gojō by tram, has a rather banal telephone conversation. It may take a moment to realize that this is in fact Kim again; just as it takes a while to realize that the young man who strikes up a friendly conversation with her in the tourist office – offscreen for a long initial portion of their scene – is Iwase. But Kim is not the interpreter from chapter one, and Iwase is now a local persimmon farmer in a grubby t-shirt.

He certainly is friendly, but not too much so, and although she is not looking for a friend, Kim lets him take her on a short cut to the part of town she wishes to visit and, the next day, to the lovely mountain town of Shinohara, also abandoned by the young. It would be disingenuous to avoid mention of Before Sunrise (1995), as over a series of protracted conversations whilst wandering aimlessly, eating dinner, etc., the two young strangers establish a rapport that one increasingly sees ending in a kiss. Maybe it does. Jang has devised an ending of simple bittersweetness, and pulls it off to perfection, as Iwase wanders through the festival, and Kim lays in the bath, then gazes at those fireworks out of her window, and we feel as though we know almost exactly what they are thinking (and it may well be different for each of us but, importantly, this is not a sequence of wordless contemplation designed to let the audience imagine whatever they want, but to relate in personal terms to what has transpired).

midsummer3

An invitation to imagination is not absent, however. Im has come to this place with no plan other than research and exploration, to find a story. The implication therefore is that chapter two is the just one of many stories to which he could have been inspired. His clear statement, near the end of chapter one, that the importance is the “who” not the “where”, is born out in the concentration on characters getting to know one another in chapter two, but the lovely, pristine, old-fashioned village backdrop has by this time become a character in its own right, and the visiting girl and the farmer spend most of their time talking about the place. And what are we to make of the fable recounted on a placard at the well, that an old woman, bringing water to a visiting stranger, was blessed with giving birth to a magical carp? Iwase receives no such distinct reward for his giving of his time and friendship, but he does reach a rare, fleeting moment of connection that is to be treasured. As for Kim’s character in chapter two, we can be less certain, although it is clear she is moved too – she reveals only late on the coquettishly-concealed nature of her work, and we never do discover what it is she is looking for, and thus it is our memory of her warm character in chapter one that allows us to take an interest – otherwise, on the page, she is nothing.

But this too is part of the film’s strength, that the players are so appealing. Iwase is immensely likeable in both incarnations, and Im is an appealingly serious-minded young man. Such a film, despite all its talk, interspersed with  longeurs and stretches of thought, can easily lose its way without a firm directorial hind, but that Jang certainly has. Coupled with the naturalness and quiet charisma of his cast – who handle long, talk-filled takes with consummate ease – it makes for a small but captivating film of no little resonance.

d/sc Jang Kun-Jae p Jang Kun-jae, Kim Woori, Naomi Kawase, Shunji Dodo, ph Fujii Masayuki ed Lee Yeon-jung, Jang Kun-jae m Lee Min-whee cast Kim Se-byeok, Im Hyeong-gook, Iwase Ryo

(2015, SKo/Jap, 96m, b/w and col)

[wpchatai]