KIM HYAK SUK AND KIM RYUNG IN THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

North Korean film financed from the US is trite, but a remarkable effort

Korean Grindhouse says North Korean director In Hak Jang's first film, My Look in the Distant Future (1997), has a screenplay that "is supposed to be about an over-aged slacker whose lust for a revolutionary girl transforms him into a model citizen in the Communist party," but primarily shows how superpatriotic conviction trumps sex. It was ten years before Jang got to make his second film, A Schoolgirl's Diary, an unsexy-sounding tale of a young woman's difficulties in becoming a scientist. Jang's third feature is 2012's Other Side of the Mountain, a saccharine North-South Korean wartime romance (and, surprisingly, a US collaboration) that is at the same time a propaganda film, extolling the bravery of North Koreans during the Fifties war, demonizing the Yanks (who are seen to bomb and massacre their South Korean allies) and advocating the reunification of the two Koreas. These ideas may please the North Koreans, but the script belongs to 76-year-old Joon Bai, a North Korean-born businessman resident in the US since the Fifties who has been involved in humanitarian aid to North Korea since 1997.

Everyone pines for their mom in this picture, which features remarkable wartime scenes for a low budget production and ravishing winter landscapes, and lots of trite, uninteresting dialogue. In Seoul, Il Gyo (Kim Ryung) is torn away from his mother when hoping to emigrate and instead brutally kidnapped on the street by soldiers (while calling for his mother) and put into the South Korean Army. He's wounded in the small town of Chunmri in North Korea and, fed up with the brutality of war, rips off his uniform. Rescued and cared for by cloyingly selfless local nurse Soon Ah (Kim Hyang Suk), Il Gyo is taken in and cared for by her and her mountain hunter dad (she's motherless). Their love grows through a winter as he rests and recovers and the pair enjoy platonic idylls in the snow.

This is an odd and unsophisticated film, full of long simpering looks and half-stifled sobs. Every so often we get a small lecture. After a while it's hardly surprising to see Soon Ah and the villagers on hand break into patriotic song, with Il Gyo joining in, or for everybody to cheer and jump for joy at a stilted-sounding radio broadcast announcing a North Korean victory. There is continuity problem, so there's already been mention between the lovers of Il Gyo's mother in Seoul before the bigger scene were he clumsily confesses to her that he's really from the other side. Gentle Soon Ah grabs a knife and then a rifle as if to shoot the man she clearly loves by now. But her dad intervenes with a philosophical speech.

Soon Il Gyo heads off on foot for the South, his limp magically gone. He promises to come back with his mother to live with Soon Ah one day. She vows to wait, forever if need be. Obviously we're dealing with a plotline as sex-free as Jang's first film's, since there's been no hanky-panky up to now and of course it doesn't work out for Il Gyo to take his mom up to the North Korean hills to rejoin Soon Ah. The war may be long over but hostilities go on as the decades go by. Seoul has an economic miracle to carry out and Pyonyang has a dynasty of crazy dictators to support, leading to poverty and starvation that continues today. But the film doesn't get into all that. It merely offers a frame tale of an eventual, too late, return, as moody, saccharine, and message-laden as the scenes between Soon Ah and Il Gyo during the Korean war.

The film offers little to the sophisticated Stateside audience, but it is an accomplishment by San Francisco-based writer/producer Joon Bai. As he explains in an interview, the film took six years to make, and is both the first US-DPRK film coproduction, shot entirely in North Korea with local actors, who worked with no pay under rugged conditions, and also the first synch sound feature made in the country.

The Other Side of the Mountain, 103 mins., debuted in the US in October 2013 and has been in various small festivals, notably the annual Korean American Film Festival New York October 24-26, 2013 at Village East Cinema in NYC . It was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco Film Society's Cinema by the Bay series, shown Sunday, November 24, 2:15 pm, Roxie Theater in San Francisco's Mission district.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.