Festival (1996)

Director Hinar Saleem's film Vodka Lemon (2003) has one of those unforgettable opening scenes. As quick as the crunching of the snow we hear upon the scene's arrival, an old man is dragged through the snowy streets of an Armenian village while still in his bed, a surreal scene that causes the viewer to stutter in their head wondering 'Huh?' We eventually discover this immobile man was being taken to a funeral to play his wind instrument. As he plays another man sings in Armenian. Brought back to the reality displayed in this fiction, I found myself reflecting on the fact that many foreign films released in the United States refuse to subtitle funeral songs. Funeral singing has been deemed something unnecessary to translate for United States viewers since, with the graves foregrounded, we get the picture. This makes Im Kwon-taek's Festival all the more unusual since not only are the funeral songs subtitled, but Korean viewers were offered titles that identified each step of the burial traditions, and English-viewers were provided with even more non-dialogue, ethnographic subtitles that documented the rationale behind each multi-theistic tradition.

Korean film scholar Han Ju Kwak states Festival is based on the writings of writer Yi Chong-jun. The film based on these stories follows a fictional author named Joon-sup (Ahn Sung-ki -- from The Housemaid to Arahan) who has returned to his home village due to the death of his mother. Upon leaving, his daughter Un-ji (Baek Jin-a) asks innocently "Grandma's dead again?", noting that there have been false alarms before. And it turns out Joon-sup's Mother fooled everyone again, because she is alive upon his arrival. (The actress playing Joon-sup's Mother is Han Eun-jin, who passed away in July 2003. She has been in close to 200 films, making me wonder, 'Should call her the Im Kwon-taek of Korean actresses or, since she outdoes Im twofold, if we should call Im the Han Eun-jin of Korean directors?' She debuted in 1939 in Mujeong and is most recognizable from Surrogate Mother.) However, Joon-sup's Mother does eventually pass away, bringing to the home family members, business associates, government officials, fellow villagers, and conflict. Much of the conflict involves impressions others have of Yong-sun (Oh Jeong-hae -- Sopyonje) and Hae-lim (Jeong Kyung-soon -- Taebaek Mountains, Segimal). Yong-sun is a niece whom Joon-sup's older brother had with a local prostitute. After Joon-sup's brother killed himself, Joon-sup's Mother insisted that the family take in Yong-sun. Yong-sun always felt like an outsider to the family, exacerbating this outsider status by stealing money from the family when she left for Seoul, and returning wearing garish makeup and clothes. Hae-lim is a magazine reporter who has followed Joon-sup's career and has come to the funeral to write an article. It is suggested that their relationship is more than just professional, and Hae-lim's presence discomforts Joon-sup's wife as much as the hole in the butt of her jeans delights the young children.

Along with this straight, realist narrative, Im includes flashbacks of Joon-sup's Mother's gradual, developing dementia, along with fantasy sequences narrating Joon-sup's first children's book where, told from Un-ji's perspective, grandmother's dementia is described as her passing on her wisdom to her granddaughter. These fantasy sequences are presented as stage-like, with a background of fake scenery, to differentiate them from both the flashbacks and the regular narrative, which Han Ju Kwak notes is a "rare formal experiment in Im's filmography." These scenes serve several purposes. Besides helping Un-ji understand her grandmother's transformations and deal with her passing, they also serve as wish-fulfillment for Joon-sup since, unlike what is presented in the children's story, he did not take his mother into his home during her illness. Also, since Im himself has said that he regrets not performing hyodo, or filial duty to one's parents, for his mother, we can see this story within the story, as well as the entire work of Festival itself, as Im's attempts to resolve the guilt he himself carried.

Many films allow wonderful comparison prospects for Festival. Although Juzo Itami's The Funeral (1984) would be the one that would come to most world cinema viewers, in Korean cinema, Park Chul-soo's Farewell, My Darling is perhaps the most interesting comparison since it was released in the very same year and is a funeral film with which the director is equally, intimately entwined by the very fact that Park plays the character of a director returning home to his father's funeral. Yet, Im's eminent status as the present patriarch of Korean cinema, representing the national cinema on the world stage, causes me to reflect back and forth upon Festival's relation to the The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), the masterpiece of Iran's premiere director Abbas Kiarostami. Both films are, in a sense, self-critiques; however, I find myself preferring Kiarostami's because we do not end up with a white-washing, positive view of Kiarostami's director surrogate, but a complicated one. Whereas, Im's novelist surrogate ends up being the hero that patriarchally leads everyone back to their rightful place in the family, a source of major contradictions that Han Ju Kwak finds in the film in his chapter for the book Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema.

Festival is not one of Im's better films. All the films I've compared Festival with here in this review are much more accomplished works. The portrayal of Joon-sup's brother's widow Wedong-taek (Baek Seung-tae -- Chihwaseon, Silmido) comes off as choppy, as does much of the stage play entrances and line deliveries directed of some of the performers. Yong-sun's reconciliation with a family member who has nagged her throughout the film arises too implausibly. As a result, the film doesn't hold my heightened attention as does Park's. What Im has accomplished here is a studied detailing of the burial traditions. Interestingly, these pre-modern traditions, being a mix of Shamanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and even Taoism, present a lie to the belief that Post-Modern collaging of cultural influences is anything new. Just as Han Ju Kwak notes that Joon-sup's mother's delayed deaths suggest "...the possibility that she is still alive, even after her actual death", Im's documentation presents how these traditions are still with us in hidden and visible forms, assimilating with and accommodating of the contemporary in order to survive along with us.