Burning and Boles

Ah-in Yoo, Jong-seo Jun and Stephen Yeun contemplate a landscape they could never equal in Burning.

There is a particularly exquisite moment in Chang-dong Lee’s Korean drama Burning (2018). The leading lady (Jong-seo Jun) gets stoned with the two men she’s been dating and starts dancing. As she dances, her hands slowly move up, reflecting a story she had told earlier about African Bushmen who dance to express their hunger. When they dance with their arms down, they’re dancing about physical hunger. When their hands move up, however, it’s about a more philosophical hunger, the desire to find some kind of meaning in life. As she dances, she removes her top, but the scene is backlit, so it’s more about her abandoning herself to some existential need than any kind of exhibitionism. Eventually, she dissolves into tears, and the camera moves away from her to linger on the countryside and the sky. Her great hunger is left unassuaged, and at that moment she and the film’s other characters seem inadequate to the world around them. Despite some beautiful images and good acting moments, the film itself feels in some ways inadequate as well. It’s not that it’s incapable of answering the big questions. What film ever is? It’s that it doesn’t seem to raise them very well.

For it’s first half hour, Burning seems to be a film about detachment. Lee Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) is an aspiring writer who rarely writes. Instead he works part time making deliveries and takes care of the family’s dying dairy farm. He renews an acquaintance with Shin Hae-mi (Jun), whom he knew as a child, and they start a casual affair. When she goes off on vacation in Africa, he cares for her cat. For half an hour, we watch him drift through his life, seemingly disconnected from all around him except the one calf left on the farm. When he makes love to Hae-mi, he hardly looks at her, only staring out the window. Later, while cat-sitting, he masturbates looking out the window at the same view. Like Lee, the filmmaking here is detached. We follow him through his routine with little commentary. It’s all objective, cold and a little dull.

When Hae-mi returns from Africa, she brings along a friend she made while stuck in the airport. Ben (Stephen Yeun) brings a new energy to the film. He’s well off, but the source of his money is never explained. Lee describes him as a “Gatsby” character, and for a while the film seems to veer into the world of social comedy. There’s an interesting contrast between Yeun’s slick coolness and the workaday worlds of Lee and Hae-mi that’s underlined when he invites them out with his friends. As Hae-mi demonstrates the dancing of the African Bushmen, they look on indulgently. Yeun even exchanges a mocking glance with Lee. It’s as if she were a pet the with-it kids had picked up somewhere — a source of humor and a reinforcement of their delusions of coolness.

Then the film takes a darker turn. After a visit to Lee’s farm, where Hae-mi repeats her dance, she disappears, and Lee begins to suspect that Ben has killed her. Now the film seems to have become a thriller, only it doesn’t have the suspense of a Hitchcock film. It’s closer to the mysteries in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and Blow-Up (1966), but without the sense of drive. Lee investigates Hae-mi’s disappearance with the same detachment he’s shown throughout the movie. Even when he starts stalking Ben, there’s something cold and removed about it, as if his concern for Hae-mi’s fate were more intellectual curiosity than actual love. Where Antonioni informed the mysteries in his films with a sense of obsession, Chang-dong Lee’s mystery seems more a question of duty, as if the director has to play out the tropes without taking any relish in them. At times, you may wish you were watching the decidedly shorter and zippier Strangers on a Train (1951) or Frenzy (1972).

Lee’s lack of connection to anything, including his search for Hae-mi, begins to suggest the film isn’t really about that relationship at all, but rather an extended courtship between Lee and Ben. In their first scenes together, Ben seems to be trying to seduce Lee in some way — whether to win his approval or get him into bed is anybody’s guess. In essence, the film’s central triangle is more homosocial than erotic. In fact, one could argue that Hae-mi is superfluous to the developing relationship between Lee and Ben. She’s only there as butch assurance, so the men’s relationship can be excused as a romantic rivalry rather than what it truly is, a courtship dance. After a while, you may question whether Lee is stalking Ben to find out what happened to Hae-mi or to find a way into his life.

Near the film’s end, Lee is caught keeping watch outside Ben’s apartment building. Instead of protesting, however, Ben invites him to a party he’s giving for the same friends Lee had met earlier. While in the apartment, Lee discovers a watch he had given Hae-me in a bathroom drawer filled with female jewelry. He also learns that Ben now has a cat. Ben hasn’t named it, but when Lee calls out for Burn, the name of Hae-mi’s cat, it comes to him. At the party, Ben’s new girlfriend, a salesgirl, does a lengthy imitation of the different ways people give her money. It’s an echo of Hae-mi’s dance for Ben’s friends earlier, including the mocking look Ben shares with Lee.. At that point, Lee leaves, but is he leaving because he thinks Ben is a serial killer or because he doesn’t want to become his next pet?

In a film more committed to its thriller conventions, this could be an intriguing mystery. In Burning, however, it just feels like a big muddle and a dismissal of Hae-mi’s individuality as a character. How can we blame Lee for his lack of investment in their relationship if the film doesn’t even invest in her. This is even more regrettable in light of Jun’s performance. She’s amazingly accomplished for an actress on her first professional job. When she meets Lee to show him her apartment, her walk is a perfect embodiment of the character — a wannabe party girl who knows that half the time she’s faking it but can’t stop herself. At times, she seems to get the character bettern than do the filmmakers. The film’s dismissal of her seems cruel and drags down the narrative.

Yoo suffers even more at the filmmakers’ hands. He’s made so detached that you may wonder if he’s even an actor (he is). He only has one scene in which he actually gets to connect, when talks about his mother’s leaving her family to escape his father’s violence and the night they burned her clothes because she was out of their lives. At that moment, you can see what a good performance Yoo could have given had the director let him.

The only actor who survives the film’s sense of detachment is Yeun. He’s fortunate in that he gets to play the character with the most energy. Whether he’s a serial killer or just a serial seducer, Ben thoroughly enjoys what he’s doing, and Yeun captures that. He’s really not romantic enough to be a Gatsby. He’s more like Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) or, if you buy him as a killer, Bruno in Strangers on a Train. Yeun has the casual good looks to pull it off (hell, his ability to maintain his looks as one of the hottest guys on The Walking Dead was almost a testament to human endurance), and there’s a sense of joy in his work that makes Ben a very convincing character. It’s a pity the film rarely rises to his or the other actors’ level.

Rhaposdy in … Green?

I recently caught up with a night of John Boles films on TCM. I’ve already written here about Craig’s Wife (see “Good and Bad Housekeeping”), but wanted to share my thoughts on three of the other pictures.

I wonder why they kicked the evening off with The King of Jazz (1930). It’s not just that Boles only turns up for only two musical numbers (he started out as a singer). It’s that his presence isn’t the real story here. The film has been out of circulation for years because of music rights and a badly decayed print. The recent restoration is a sight to behold, particularly the Technicolor Walter Lantz cartoon that opens the film. Color wasn’t enough to sell the picture to the public, however, and it’s considered the film that ended the first cycle of big-screen musicals. That’s easy to understand. Like The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Show of Shows (both 1929), it has no plot, just a string of musical numbers and comic sketches of varying qualities, in this case built around the popularity of big band leader Paul Whiteman. The dance numbers are pretty static; they cry out for a Busby Berkeley or Fred Astaire to get the camera involved. The early sound equipment makes Jeanette Loff’s soprano voice almost achingly shrill. The sketches are desperately unfunny. For contemporary audiences, the film’s real star is Bing Crosby, who was part of the Rhythm Boys back then. His singing is light, almost improvisational and a lot of fun. You can see how he became a big star within a few years.

The film’s centerpiece, however, is George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” By 1929, Gershwin had become dissatisfied with Whiteman’s interpretation of the piece. Its rendition in this film probably made his head explode. It opens with an extensive drum solo Gershwin never wrote danced by Jacques Cartier, a white dancer dressed in pseudo African attire and a black rubber suit that’s a full body version of black face. Those few minutes could probably fuel a dissertation on cultural appropriation. When the Gershwin music starts, Cartier is back in a green tux, miming playing the clarinet to the solo that opens the piece. And he keeps playing the clarinet, even as other instruments take over. There are some bad cuts in the music, the dancers are often out of time and because blue didn’t photograph well in two-strip Technicolor, it’s all done up in shades of green. Yet the squence creates its own warped reality, particularly when a grand piano opens to reveal the Whiteman orchestra inside. It’s like a pops concert on acid.

Douglass Montgomery is putty in the hands of Gloria Swanson and John Boles in Music in the Air.

At least Boles has a starring role in Music in the Air (1934), an adaptation of the hit Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical. In true Hollywood fashion, the film leaves out the show’s biggest hit, “The Song Is You,” though the number is performed under the opening titles. Boles and Gloria Swanson, in her last film for seven year, are a battling stage couple. Boles handles the material pretty well and shows a real flair for musical satire when he re-creates the finale of operetta he’s writing. Swanson sings beautifully, but her acting is too over-the-top for what’s supposed to be sophisticated material. She may not have had a dead body floating in her swimming pool, but it’s clear from this that there was more of Norma Desmond in Swanson than she ever wanted to admit.

The plot hinges on Boles and Swanson’s using a pair of young innocents — a small-town songwriter and his sweetheart — to get at each other. The girl, June Travis, plays the role as well as anybody could, but she’s been dubbed by another of those headache-inducing, shrill sopranos, and by 1934 you can’t blame that on the sound equipment. The boy, however, is a breath of fresh air. Douglass Montgomery was a real looker who should have had a better career (being gay off-screen may have held him back). He’s a very convincing and attractive young innocent, and he’s dubbed by a baritone who’s very easy on the ears.

There are two curious footnotes on the film. One of the writers is Billy Wilder, and the background music was written by Franx Waxman, both of whom would reunite with Swanson for the much more successful Sunset Boulevard (1950). In a bit part with no lines, Marjorie Main plays Swanson’s longsuffering maid. While Swanson’s busy chewing scenery, Main walks off with every scene she’s in by virtue of simplicity and commitment.

If Lionel Atwill, Julie Haydon, Irene Dunne and John Boles don’t watch out

Helen Westley will steal The Age of Innocence from them.

Before Martin Scorsese’s justly celebrated 1993 version of Edith Wharton’s novel, Hollywood had tackled The Age of Innocence twice before. I don’t know anybody who’s seen the silent version from 1924, but the RKO rendition from 1934 finished off TCM’s tribute to Boles. It’s a strange business, lacking the opulence and passion of Scorsese’s film. This version is adapted from a stage dramatization of the novel, so it’s talky and visually static. It’s also missing a lot of the novel’s subplots and minor characters. It hits all the thematic points about American and European values in conflict, but at 90 minutes, it’s pretty bare bones.

As Newland Archer, the young attorney torn between his duty to fiancée May Welland (Julie Haydon) and his passion for the married Countess Olenska (Irene Dunne), Boles is uncharacteristically stiff, as though the 19^th century costumes were squeezing the life out of him. Dunne seems like a comedienne waiting to happen. She only comes to life when the Countess has a playful moment or two. I suppose she deserves some kind of credit for spitting out the clunky dialogue without laughing or puking. When Boles suggests they go somewhere they can be free, she says:

Where is that place? Has anyone ever been there? Because I know so many who have tried to find it. And, believe me, they all got out by mistake, at some wayside station, like Dieppe or Pisa or Monte Carlo. It wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left. Only, smaller and dingier and more promiscuous. You see, over there, we think it’s over here. And over here we thing it’s over there. But, now I know it isn’t anywhere.

Actors have gone on suspension to avoid better dialogue than that.

With the stars hamstrung by bad writing, you have to look to the supporting cast for any joy.  Haydon doesn’t get a lot to do as May (at least in the remake Winona Ryder got to play the character’s more manipulative scenes on-screen), but there’s one look of death she shoots at Boles near the film’s end that points to the better work she would do in The Scoundrel (1935) and on stage (she was the original Laura in The Glass Menagerie). Laura Hope Crews is her delightfully daffy self as May’s mother, and Lionel Atwill is fun as a society bon vivant who would be a coded gay man if the script didn’t give him designs on Dunne. Best of all is Helen Westley, a stage veteran probably best remembered by film audiences as Shirley Temple’s aunt in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938). She’s an inveterate scene–stealer, and casting her as Dunne and Haydon’s eccentric grandmother is a gift to the audience. Maybe TCM should build an evening around her work.