Butler's Cinema Scene

Ah-in Yoo, Jong-weo Jun, Steven Yeun

“BURNING” My rating: B 

148 minutes | No MPAA rating

Class warfare, economic hardship, generational conflict and, who knows, maybe even a murder are the issues swirling around in  “Burning,” a film that seems in no hurry to get anywhere but in which, we realize much later, every moment counts.

Chang-Dong Lee’s drama — South Korea’s official nominee for this year’s Oscar for Foreign Language Film — centers on Jong-Su (Ah-in Yoo), a twenty something living on the economic edge in modern Seoul.  It’s not clear exactly how Jong-Su survives. We see the army veteran lugging bagged clothes around the streets, but whether his business is legit or not is never plumbed.

He’s schlepping his way through the day when he stumbles across Hae-Mi (Jong-Seo Jin), with whom he grew up in a rural farming community.  Hae-Mi is now employed as a sort of model; clad in a cheerleader outfit she hawks bargains on the sidewalk outside a department store.

She’s bouncy and adventurous and claims to be on a spiritual quest.  After bedding the bowled-over Jong-Su she asks him to feed her cat while she goes searching for inner truth in Africa.

Jong-Su agrees (he never sees the cat but the food bowl keeps emptying and the litter box keeps filling); moreover he uses his visits to Hae-Mi’s one-room apartment as an opportunity to masturbate.  He may not be a very demonstrative guy, but it’s pretty clear Jong-Su is smitten.

Which makes it all the worse when Hae-Mi returns from Kenya with a new guy in tow.  This is Ben (Steven Yeun, late of cable’s “Walking Dead”), who is clearly playing in another league.  Ben dresses well, drives an expensive sports car, seems utterly unimpressed by anything (at one point he claims never to have wept) and, when asked what he does, replies “I play.”

Jong-su, who wants to be a novelist (though we never see him writing), takes to calling this new acquaintance “the Great Gatsby.”

At least Ben lets the puppylove-tormented Jong-Su  hang out with him and Hae-Mi.  One one particular weekend the three party on Jong-Su’s rundown family farm (his divorced father is in jail after an altercation with a neighbor); during a marijuana-steeped evening Hae-Mi does a naked dance as the sun sets and Ben reveals to Jong-Su that his hobby is setting fire to the ugly plastic-draped greenhouses that litter the landscape. 

Ah-in Yoo

“Burning’s” first 90  minutes are basically a setup for the mystery that consumes the rest of the film.  Put succinctly, Hae-mi vanishes.  Ben claims not to know where she’s gone — maybe on another self-improvement sabbatical? — and Jong-Su, suspecting foul play, turns amateur sleuth, stalking Ben and re-examining everything Hae-Mi ever told him about her life in a frustrating search for clues.

He also finds himself weirdly drawn to Ben’s stories of arson; he begins casing nearby greenhouses that he could torch.

It becomes clear fairly early on that filmmaker Chag-Dong Lee is less interested in solving Hae-Mi’s disappearance than in examining Jong-Su’s suspicions and his growing hatred of Ben and everything the rich kid stands for.

Unfortunately, “Burning” never gives us anyone to root for.  Jong-Su, our protagonist, isn’t stupid but he’s unquestionably bland (which makes him seem even more backward in the presence of the suavely cool Ben).

Hae-Mi is cute and flighty in a Holly Golightly way, but also terribly silly and shallow.

Ben, of course, is a charming mystery man.  But is he a killer?  With Yeun’s subtle performance anything is possible.

The star of the film is a screenplay (by Jungmi Oh and Chang-Dong Lee) in which even throwaway moments come back to haunt us. That and the direction, which imbues even the commonplace with unsettling darkness.  Particularly awesome are a couple of quietly jaw-dropping one-take scenes.

Ultimately “Burning” is more of a cerebral enterprise than an emotional one. But once it gets in your head it won’t stop pecking away at the viewer’s consciousness.

| Robert W. Butler