DVD Review
Peppermint Candy
Directed by Lee Chang-dong
By Noel Vera
Lee Chang-dong’s sophomore feature Peppermint Candy (1999) is perhaps his most formally innovative, starting with a man’s suicide going backwards — an idea borrowed from Harold Pinter’s play and later film Betrayal, and executed contemporaneously alongside Christopher Nolan’s Memento.
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What distinguishes Lee’s film from Nolan’s is his deft handling of South Korean sociopolitical history, a summary of events from 1980 to 1999 as they parallel the life of one Kim Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu): a few days before (we learn) Kim lost his business due to embezzlement from a business partner, lost most of his money due to stock market losses (the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis), the rest to a loan shark, lost his wife and child because — but I get ahead of myself.
Films like these you know the first question that comes to mind: is the structure justified? Is the backwards time scheme a gimmick to draw attention from the audience or a crucial tactic for presenting the film’s main theme? For the first half hour you’re not quite sure: even the details seem random, odd. Kim walks into a riverside picnic and you get the sense that he’s staggering drunk — he blinks uncomprehendingly even when they recognize him, shrieks words into an offered microphone (“What should I do, you left so suddenly? What should I do, I can’t live without you? Do you have a secret no one knew? You were so tender! Na-na-na-na! Na-na-na! Na-na-na-na!”). He climbs up on the nearby railroad bridge, which worries everyone till they realize the train is coming from the opposite direction. Then the other train blows its whistle.
Fade to black. Footage of rails rushing past — as if the camera was mounted on the train’s nose, taking in the forward view. Then we realize as we see onlookers and pedestrians walking in reverse that the train is really going the other way and this is the rear view, with Lee running the footage backwards.
The first flashback takes place only three days before; Kim is living in a wretched shack, cadging coffee off of hapless vendors and pleading to see the puppy of his ex-wife Hong-ja (Kim Yeo-jin), who won’t even let him in the door. He does receive a surprise visit from the husband of his first love, Yun Sun-im (Moon So-ri) — she’s in the hospital, on life support. He brings her a gift of peppermint candies, which he offers with pathetic futility.
As we go back in time we learn more of the man; his business seems prosperous enough (the crisis caught most people by surprise), his new house and loving family beautiful enough. But then he learns that his wife is having an affair with her driving instructor, and — under the gaze of a horrifically impassive fixed camera — shoves his way into their room to beat the driver, beat his wife; wife and lover grovel on all fours nude, their howling dismay underlining the bestial ignominy of the moment.
If a metaphor helps, Kim is basically an onion and Lee’s film is all about peeling him layer by layer. To the grotesque scene of cuckoldry Lee adds the breathless hypocrisy of Kim conducting his own affair with an officemate (later at a housewarming in Kim’s new residence, both Hong-ja and officemate prepare the party food). Moving further backwards we learn that Kim’s previous job was police officer, and that he was one of the better, more practiced interrogators out there (about this time we hear a second mention of Yun, who shares a hometown with the suspect they happen to be tracking).
Lee seems to know exactly what he’s doing, what effects he’s after. By telling his story ending first he trades surprise for suspense, the shock of seeing a man kill himself for the suspense of learning why he’d want to do so. Along the way Lee builds a detailed portrait of a monster — an instrument of South Korea’s fascist past, a police officer to whom torture is a regular tactic and essential work-kit tool (Comparisons to similar scenarios in the Philippines back in the 1970s and today not just possible but inevitable).
But Lee doesn’t just leave it there: he moves further back, to Kim’s first time interrogating a prisoner (a superbly shot scene where Kim and his fellow officers enter through a steel door to look pitilessly offscreen, the camera finally panning down to reveal the interview subject on the floor, naked and trussed like a pig). He visits Kim’s military history, and the defining trauma that help kill the man’s humanity, desensitizing him into an effective tool of the regime.
At the same time Yun’s presence grows stronger and stronger, a specter that flits in and out of Kim’s life, representing (in many ways) the innocent he used to be. When in one harrowing scene Kim displays his contempt for Yun, it’s his own innocence he’s rejecting, his own humanity he’s subtly and cruelly torturing.
By the film’s final flashback Kim has managed to win back much (if not all) of our sympathy, and every object and detail that we puzzled over in the first half now registers onscreen with full import, like cathedral chimes unveiled — railroad tracks, peppermint candies, that ridiculous song (“Do you have a secret no one knew?”). Lee uncovers each layer, each secret, until we’re left marveling at the piece of work that is a man. A breathlessly great film.
