Chunhyang

"Im Kwon Taek's Chunhyang, Korea's largest cinematic production ever — a four month shoot employing over 8,000 extras and some 12,000 costumes — made its world premiere in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival 2000.

This epic tale of forbidden passion, devotion and the glorious triumph of love in adversity is set in 18th Century Korea and begins as Mongryong, the privileged son of the Governor of Namwon, falls in love with Chunhyang, the beautiful daughter of a proud former courtesan. Soon after they are married in secret, Mongryong is ordered to Seoul to finish his education. He leaves reluctantly and promises that once he finishes his schooling he will send for his beloved. But time passes, and a new, vindictive Governor is appointed in the province where Chunhyang lives. This new Governor pursues Chunhyang and when she refuses his advances, she is imprisoned and sentenced to death. Chunhyang's only hope for being saved is her faith in the promise Mongryong once made to her.

In order to retell the timeless story of Chunhyang Im Kwon Taek has incorporated the ancient operatic tradition of pansori — a stylized narrative art form incorporating dance, music and song, which dates back to the days of the Chosun Dynasty."

Chunhyang fades to black with a classic folk-tale formula: "The King lifted taxes and the people all lived in peace. But who knows what will happen after this story?"

Instead of affirming the enduring love of its reunited heroine and hero, the film concludes with a comment on the fragility of social justice. And this is just the last of many clues that veteran Korean director Im Kwon Taek's new drama is first and foremost about the central place of sociopolitical commitments in decent human lives.

Of course the film's young lovers don't have to waste screen time discussing such priorities. Having been raised "right," they're well beyond prattle about ideology and social responsibility. From those to whom much has been given, much is expected. It's really that simple for these kids, who marry at fifteen but are already far too socially conscious to mistake mutual passion for the meaning of their lives.

First-time viewers might be forgiven for focusing on the love story. (Reviewers should be flogged for doing so.) Chunhyang (Sung Lee Hyo) and her husband Mongryong Lee (Cho Seung Woo) are certainly an appealing couple. Their lovemaking is depicted at length — with humor, sweetness, and modesty too. And it's encouraged by the bride's mother, a one-time courtesan. I dare say most American parents know nothing more — and care nothing more — about how to help their children have endearing sex than about how to run a fair election. Mongryong's age alone would get him locked up in most states.

But there's never a moment's possibility that the young lovers in Chunhyang will embark on 18th-century Korea's version of the Good Ship Lifestyle. For one thing, they recognize each other from the outset as iconoclasts. He first spots her out in the forest, dressed in red silk, standing on a swing and sailing a hundred feet off the ground. When his servant Pangja later accuses her of inspiring desire with her bared ankles, he's just teasing. What Mongryong loves at once is Chunhyang's social daring. She in turn has already refused countless offers of marriage, even from members of Mongryong's own governing class. When she accepts him, it's because they've discovered each other as fellow poets.

But what this means is not that they'll be a-talkin' and a-writin' real purty (though that's true too). Even the most traditional poetry has less to do with beauties of rhythm and rhyme than with verbal play, layered meaning, and complexity of tone. This couple belongs together because they're capable of the interpretive subtlety necessary to fully grasp each other's words — a subtlety they will need in the face of long separation and threats to their lives.

American film reviewers are by-and-large dead to both poetry and to politics. Their collective, and mutually reinforcing, fixation upon the elements of romance and adventure has allowed even the most obvious elements of political subtext in Ang Lee's widely-praised but poorly understood Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to pass without notice. The link between poetry and politics is rendered explicit in that film in the scene where Jen (Zhang Ziyi) writes Yu Shu Lien's (Michelle Yeoh) name with a large brush, impressing on her the resemblance between calligraphy and sword fighting, and between the name "Shu Lien" and the Mandarin word for "sword."

It's no shock, therefore, that although Chunhyang's construction actively thematizes poetry, that too has been almost entirely ignored. Misunderstanding of Taek's primary concerns is nearly guaranteed by this failure. The movie's central structuring device is the juxtaposition of Cho Sang Hyun's pansori verse narration with the camera's visual storytelling.

Several wildly lazy critics complained that the use of Cho's performance is redundant — since we don't need to be told what we can see for ourselves. But in fact, over and over, what Cho tells us is belied by what we're seeing exactly at that moment. Cho tells us that Mongryong's horse took off toward Seoul from Chunhyang's compound like "a flying tiger"; what we see instead is an overburdened little pony mincing its steps along an uneven path, while Pangja tugs ineffectually at the bridle. We're told that Mongryong is wearing the blue cloak of a royal "Ethics Official" when he heads home from Seoul after scoring the highest mark on the civil service exam; instead we see him wearing the cream colored robe of the beggar.

Cho's narration is thus far from reliable, and when the camera cuts periodically to a contemporary Korean audience responding passively and sentimentally to his version of events, we're being warned not to repeat their mistake. Instead, we're being signaled to attend to the action of Chunhyang for ourselves. If we do, we can easily figure out what our present-day pansori, Im Kwon Taek, has made new the traditional tale. What he's made is a deeply class-conscious story of resistance to unjust authority in which two young lovers wield poetry as a weapon of rebellion.

When Chunhyang spurns just-appointed Governor Byun's demands that she become his concubine after the lovers have married, he sentences her to be clubbed ten times on the lower fibula. Byun counts out the number of each stroke. As the awful whack of oak on bone echoes, the victim redeems her suffering with a verse. After the first blow, she cries out "I have only one love. For only one man." To the second and third, she answers: "Two can never be," and then "I have three lives, and three loyalties: to my father, my husband, and my son." In another context, such lines might sound deferential to male primacy. Here they constitute radical defiance of it, as a teenager shames the Governor with the voice of outraged populist virtue. "Even if you tear me into four pieces," Chunhyang continues "and those four into four more, I still won't accept you." The underlying political subtext — that personal virtue is tied to public virtue — then becomes explicit: "So think of our country's five ethics." It's hard to imagine a moment that more fully illustrates poet Percy Shelley's claim that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

The poetic words of Chunhyang have a directly revolutionary effect. Everyone in town witnesses her beating, and her broken body being taken away afterwards. "So beating innocent people is the new governor's way to rule?" her mother yells out. A young villager instantly enrolls the tortured poet in the roster of Korea's heroic female martyrs — one who saved a king, another who killed an enemy general, a third who saved her husband from starving. A popular song chronicling Chunhyang's suffering and courage begins circulating.

Before long, local peasants are ready to maul a stranger who repeats a rumor that she visits Byun every night: "How dare you insult her? Who the hell told you that? We'll rip his eyes out and cut his ears off!" The buzzing of popular outrage eventually reaches the ears of the clueless governing class. "There are rumors that the Governor of one town has been caught embezzling!"an official whispers at Byun's birthday party (scheduled to end with Chunhyang's execution). "Why do you think there are so many people gathered outside?" another wonders.

All this sets the stage for a second revolutionary performance poet: Mongryong who, still in disguise, interrupts the birthday festivities. He's commanded by Byun to compose a poem on the spot — and he's to be flogged if he fails. Mongryong’s simple but defiant verse picks up where his wife's had left off:

Wine in golden vases
Is the blood of a thousand people.
Food on jade plates
Is the lives of a thousand people.

And with that, the peasants and courtesans of Namwon turn their world upside down.

When we last see Chunhyang, she is traveling toward Seoul in a palanquin. A young woman peeks in, then backs off, visibly awed by this example of living virtue. But it's not because Chunhyang's a wife, however faithful, that she's so honored. It's because she's a working class hero whose defiance has disgraced and undermined unjust authority. Notably, it's not because Chunhyang's a pretty woman at the center of a love story. But you'd never know that from reading what trivial American critics have had to say about this film. What they always got most wrong is the priority of director Taek's themes. Universally, they presumed that the film is first of all about its romance element. James Berardinelli provides a convenient example: "The basic storyline for Chunhyang is as old as the human race: forbidden love taking precedence over all social and political associations...thrown in are some pointed and barbed attacks on the political system that existed during the Chosun dynasty."

This is exactly wrong. This film's hero and heroine have grown to young adulthood immersed in a national poetry filled with tales of sacrifice and struggle in service of ordinary people. Sharing a deep concern for the public good makes their falling in love possible.

This point is made most clearly by director Im Kwon Taek's use of luxury foods as a motif. During the couple's wedding night love play, an overvoiced duet narrates a man seducing a woman with a series of treats — taffy, cherries, grapes, and "a poked-round watermelon/ to savor [all] in one big bite." Every time, the woman replies, "No, I don't want any." Chunhyang's implied refusal to exchange edible goodies for sexual submission foreshadows her rejection of Byun. Chunhyang shows here that she's not for sale (in contrast to the many courtesans who will later hurry in to display themselves for the Governor). Taek confirms the association of luxury foods with corrupted power relations when a team of courtesans offer Byun tall stacks of fruit and candy to celebrate Chunhyang's day of execution. "I wouldn't miss it for anything," beams a local lord, chomping on a sweet. The local peasants meanwhile complain that Byun is exacting so much rice from them that "We're all grumbling ghosts."

Must a film like this bring out the worst of ugly Americanism? A number of reviewers acknowledged their unfamiliarity with pansori, and hedged their discussions. (Those who did so without comparing Cho's voice to a chicken or a cat in heat might be granted a low pass in Cultural Imperialism 101.) Puzzled commentary often boiled down to the plaintive query: Why don't they act more like us? Why, for example, doesn't Mongryong write letters to his wife during the three years of their separation while he studies in Seoul? (Why, in other words, doesn't he balance career and relationship like an upwardly-mobile Ameritrash bourgeois?)

The answer is: because Mongryong's not in pursuit of a "career" or "relationship." He's training to become what the subtitles translate as an "Ethics Official," the Chosun dynasty equivalent of an undercover judge of the English monarchy's equity court. As such, he will have the authority to remove a Governor and local lords from their offices — and to do so without recourse to trial or even to any investigation beyond his own. For Mongryong to join this very select group of individuals — to become one of his society's most powerful agents of morality and peace — is sufficient reason both for his sacrifices and for those of his wife. "Chunhyang" dramatizes a view of the world in which the love of justice is even more important than romance. And that's really not such an odd idea — unless of course you've grown up believing American film criticism.

Reviewed by Rob Content