The Morals of Nature
In the eight years since Poetry premiered at Cannes, narrative cinema of the sort that director Lee Chang-dong specializes in has hit a fallow period unseen in decades. Coincidence, perhaps, but one need not look much further than the festival’s interceding Competition line-ups, traditionally rounded out with at least nominally dramatic narrative films, to sense an unfortunate lapse in competent (which is to say competently cinematic) storytelling. Indeed, even the most fruitful of current trends, most predicated on some hybrid variant of fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, have managed to grow familiar, if not altogether tiresome, in the interim. As if on cue, Lee’s long-awaited sixth feature, Burning, arrived in Competition at Cannes to remind viewers just how complacent narrative cinema has grown in recent years, and to reconfirm the South Korean auteur as arguably one of the world’s great dramatic storyteller. It promptly won zero awards. (Time will likely look more favorably upon the independent FIPRESCI jury, who awarded the film its top prize.)
Based on the short story “Barn Burning” by Japanese author Murakami Haruki, Lee’s latest internalizes many of its source writer’s traits and thematic preoccupations. Foregoing much of the openly emotional and productively melodramatic flourishes of his past work, Burning is Lee’s most cerebral, psychologically engrossing film to date, a moral tale in the guise of a thriller that finds the filmmaker and former novelist bending the rules of genre to more readily resemble allegorical fiction. In transposing Murakami’s modest ten-page story about a struggling young writer who slowly loses his love interest to a mysterious stranger with a penchant for arson, Lee has refashioned a number of the cultural and psychoanalytic elements that he explored in the decades-spanning Peppermint Candy (1999) into a distinctly contemporary meditation on the sociopolitical forces plaguing Korean youth. If Lee has rarely been this topical, he’s also never been quite this formally and stylistically mischievous, utilizing the narrative’s sociological particulars to engage a number of dramatic devices that continually upend readings of the film’s metaphoric premise.
Lee and co-screenwriter Oh Jung-mi expand considerably
