Faking It

Lee Yoon-ki's This Charming Girl, which I first saw at the 2005 Berlinale, remains one of the most impressive debut features in recent years. It heralded the arrival of a truly unique and independent voice in Korean cinema, and the film quickly became one of my favorites of the year. His follow-up, the Los Angeles-set ensemble piece Love Talk was an ambitious and admirable effort that suffered from Lee trying to do too much with too much. The foreign locale (and language) combined with the multi-threaded plot found Lee keeping too great a distance from his subjects – the exact opposite of This Charming Girl, which was almost a micro-portrait of a woman silently suffering from a personal trauma. With his third film, Ad Lib Night (seen at this year's Berlinale), Lee has crafted a hybrid of sorts – an amazingly powerful film where the internalized suffering of one character is countered by the frequent and repeated emotional outbursts from a group of others. The film opens in Seoul, with two young men approaching a woman they see on the street (Han Hyo-ju), convinced she is Myeong-eun, who ran away from their village several years ago. Though she denies this several times, they aren't entirely convinced. Regardless of her true identity, they ask if she will accompany them to the village to say goodbye to her (or Myeong-eun's) father, who is on his deathbed. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, she agrees to join them. The bulk of the film (which takes place over a single night) is set in the dying man's home, where an extended group of inheritance-hungry family members alternates between bickering and shedding crocodile tears while waiting for the old man to shuffle off this mortal coil. Surprisingly, the focus shifts from the mystery woman, whose function as ad-libbing stand-in daughter becomes secondary to the various mini-dramas played out between family members. The transition is quite subtle, and the film even becomes comical for a time before slowly drifting back to the question of the identity of the still-unnamed woman. The dynamic Lee creates between the dysfunctional (albeit tight) family unit and the outsider is nothing short of brilliant. The film is bookended by two extended (and beautifully shot) driving sequences, and it is on the journey back to Seoul that we learn a bit more about this woman. As it was in This Charming Girl, the information doesn't function as a third act reveal or a simple answer for audience placation. Instead, we are sharing a cathartic moment, a first step, perhaps, towards healing. Lee's aesthetic intimacy – filming mostly in close-ups, limiting the perspective (mostly) to that of the woman – allows him to pull this off without a hint of schmaltz or sentimentality. Lee is often mentioned in the same breath as Hong Sang-soo, and though their work stands apart from the more commercial fare being produced in South Korea, their differences outweigh their similarities. Whereas Hong often presents us with characters who won't (or can't) own up to their weaknesses, failings, or emotional scars, Lee taps into something quite different. His is a cinema of loneliness that casts its gaze on damaged souls, while quietly documenting their unarticulated suffering. There's little in the way of traditional dramatic tension; instead we are simply shown the mundane and ordinary day-to-day events of his character's lives – the little things that lead towards acceptance or reconciliation. Hong's characters turn to others for support, and express themselves through drink, sex, and misguided emotion, while Lee's choose a more internalized, solitary approach. Yet Lee isn't a nihilist, quite the opposite in fact. Though his character's problems are never brought to resolution, there are at least glimmers of hope. It's a remarkable approach that in lesser hands would fail miserably. Like Hong, the influence of European cinema is obvious, yet the characters, relationships, and social constructs are unmistakably Korean. Ignoring the sophomore slump that was Love Talk, there is remarkable progression in Lee's writing and directing between This Charming Girl and Ad Lib Night, and I'm both curious and excited as to where Lee will go next. Ad Lib Night is a tremendous film that positions Lee as one of the most absorbing directors working today. Ad Lib Night has been selected for this year's San Francisco International Film Festival. Don't miss it.