Jungle Story (1996)

According to Kim Hong-joon's harshest critic, Jungle Story is "The most boring rock movie ever made!" That unrelenting critic is director Kim himself. Kim is, of course, being somewhat facetious with that self-critique. What he really means is this is not the rock movie many might expect. As Akira Mizuta Lippit has noted, Jungle Story refuses to follow the basic rock film genre narrative trajectory: band forms, band rises to fame, band falls from grace, band learns moral lesson and/or rises again. Like later films such as Waikiki Brothers and Mr. Gam's Victory, we have a protagonist whose star doesn't shine as brightly as one expects in a usually star-studded genre. The boredom audiences might feel watching Jungle Story may be mainly from the dissonance certain genre expectations cause within viewers when not fulfilled by the director.

The story follows the character Yun Do-hyun, a young man fresh out of military service who decides to keep pursuing his rock star dreams in silent disagreement with his father's stern counter commands to pursue a direction that leads to a more reliably profitable profession. Yun instead takes a job selling guitars at a music store so he can practice while working and eventually slacks into the lead singer slot of a hard-rock-ish band. He is later discovered by a record executive through whom he also acquires a manager. The record he is contracted to make is pop-oriented, requiring aesthetic and ethical compromises fromYun. I'll stop with the plot trajectory here, since telling any more risks ruining some of the unique subtle shifting of this anti-rock, rock film.

Yun Do-hyun is played by none other than Yun Do-hyun, a real-life 90's Korean rock star. However, he is not intended to be himself. Kim has utilized many 90's rock stars in this film, such as the members of Easy Rider, Anti-Social, and Monkeyhead. He also procured an actual rock basement venue, Rock World, as an onsite location within the film. And Yun's manager is played by Shin Ha-chul, whom Kim notes as one of the rare successful Korean rock stars before the 90's. In this film, Shin's character later becomes a concert promoter, underscoring his real-life charge to help bands acquire the recognition he feels they deserve. Kim is often asked if this film is of actors playing musicians or musicians playing actors, to which Kim responds, neither. These are "Musicians playing musicians."

Herein lies my main interest in Kim's film, the same aspect that, sadly, resulted in the weak turnout of paying customers, poor reviews from critics, and considerable humility upon the part of the director. Kim's main intent was to document the lives and methods of South Korea's 90's rock scene, not to follow mainstream film conventions. Perhaps Kim should have done a documentary instead, as he has suggested, but conveying such subculture specifics is fine for fictional features as well, it's just that doing such runs counter to mainstream cliches. And without those mainstream cliches, one can risk not obtaining mainstream success. So instead Kim has provided simple, smirk-inducing pleasures for those familiar with the underground scene, such as Yun's constant visits to the pharmacy to pick up a case of "Bacchus", a caffeine tonic that acts as a surrogate for the less accessible harder drugs for these harder rockers. Throwing back about 10 cans in one sitting apparently gives a considerable enough high that one would come back for more, as our pharmacist knows by eventually not even having to ask Yun what he wants when he enters her shop.

Kim attended Temple University in Philadelphia where he studied Anthropology. Such knowledge comes in handy when documenting a subculture. Particularly poignant is the explication of the Korean underground rock culture's own established ethical system. One of the ethical tenets Kim was exposed to was that which declares 'Thou Shalt Not Lip-Synch.' This tenet stands because it is believed each performance should be spontaneous and unique from the previous one. Kim has noted that this was the most frustrating part of making the film because of the subculture's resistance and, since this went against their ethics, they had little experience synching their performance to a soundtrack. (The drums were the most difficult to convey realistically in this process since even the most un-musically-skilled eye will notice mistakes in drum-synching.) Kim demonstrates this very frustration by including a scene in the Rock World venue where a video director runs up against this obstacle while filming. Such lip-synching of such raucous performances on such a grand scale places Jungle Story as an important film within Korean cinema's recent popular surge because the film broke sound ground from which later films could further advance. Although most commentators have focused on the advances in the visual production values of South Korean cinema, Jungle Story provides a turning point for sound production that scholars would benefit from investigating further.

Since this "boring" film failed at the box office and was panned by critics, one could say that the film was unsuccessful. Yet, to his credit, this reviewer, who has never found himself much enjoying the hard-rock genre, found himself appreciating a few of the songs appearing in the film, such as the last song played at Rock World's final day of business, a scene that eerily foreshadows the closing of the real-life Rock World after a long and antagonistic relationship with the local authorities. Yet even without an appreciation for hard rock, watching it within proper context rather than constrained within genre expectations and, to use film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum's term, "economic correctness," one finds that the film was indeed in sync with the people, the movement, and the time depicted within the film. And the narrative actually ended up being prophetic of the film's eventual reception. To have had Jungle Story perform otherwise would have been, according to this subculture, downright unethical.