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4.0 out of 5 stars
Everybody else has., July 3, 2005
This review is from: Chorok mulkogi [VHS] (VHS Tape)
During his train ride back home after his term in the army has ended, Makdong decides to get some fresh air by hanging his head out of one of the train's open entrances. As he does this he notices a lovely woman doing the same. As the woman glances at him, her red scarf comes loose and lands on Makdong's face. Wanting to return the scarf, Makdong discovers that the woman is being harassed by three hoodlums. His interceding allows the woman to get away, but Makdong receives a beating for his efforts. It seems at first Makdong is going to let this slide, but when the three men get off the train, the young former soldier follows and cracks one of the three on back of the head with an award he received from the army.
Makdong eventually returns to his widowed mother's home where she resides with his physically disabled older brother. Before his father died, the family home had been well kept. However, the following years had been unkind, so the house fell into disrepair. Makdong soon learns that his mother does housekeeping work to keep herself afloat. Makdong dislikes this and tells his mother to cease working as a housekeeper. He goes on to say that he will earn lots of money to take care of her. These are big words for someone without a job.
Makdong's two other older brothers are not in much better shape. One sells eggs for a living and the other is a cuckolded police officer. Things seem to be going nowhere for our hero until he encounters Miae, the woman from the train, in a nightclub. It turns out that Miae is the, unwilling, girlfriend of Bae Taegon a high ranking member of the Korean mafia. Bae is impressed by Makdong's willingness to fight and later in the film, after Makdong clubs one of Bae's men on the head with a wooden post, the former soldier becomes a member of Bae's "family."
_Green Fish_ is an interesting film. It has its moments of family tenderness and heartbreak and is also peppered throughout with gang violence. One of the most interesting relationships within the film is the one shared between Miae and Bae. Although Bae continuously tells Miae that he loves her, it seems that she is little more than a tool for him to use, meaning that she sleeps with whomever Bae tells her to. In one of the saddest parts of the film, Miae asks Makdong If he wants to sleep with her. She says it is okay if he wants to; everyone else has slept with her.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Drawn down into the depths, February 25, 2010
"Green Fish" ("Chorok Mulgogi") is a highly-influential and popular Korean film from 1997. It is the first feature film directed by influential novelist and playwright Lee Chang-dong (
Oasis), who would later hold the Presidential cabinet position of Minister of Culture for Korea and would be awarded the Chevalier order of the Legion d'Honneur by the French government for his contributions to promoting cultural diversity.
The story begins with Makdong being recently discharged from the army and attempting to re-enter civilian life. His family, once proud farmers with acres of land, has been reduced to selling eggs in a traveling truck and doing cleaning in order to survive. The only member of his family who approaches respectability is an older brother who is a coward and a cuckold. Their farmland has been paved over and covered with concrete apartment buildings, and little of Makdong's remember home remains.
Disillusioned and desperate to provide a better life for his family, Makdong meets Miae one evening on a train, a woman who will lead him down a dark and desperate path. While attempting to help Miae, Makdong is brutally beaten but manages to impress the gang boss Bae Taegon. Bae Taegon claims that Miae is his girlfriend, but has no qualms pimping her out when it suits his purposes. Slowly, Makdong is drawn into this criminal underworld, at first with the pure intentions of providing for his family but in time he will be forced to see exactly what he has become in the process.
"Green Fish" is a gritty, psychological gang thriller. Director Lee intended the film as a harsh critique of Korea's industrializing and urbanizing drive at the time that was rapidly destroying traditional ways but replacing them only with vice and violence. Makdong represents the corrupted innocence of the country people, and what adaptations are necessary in order to survive. Yet even in the whirlwind of blood and betrayal Makdong finds himself in, his heart is still pure enough to pity and find affection for Miae, who has become little more than a hallow tool for Bae Taegon.
As Lee's first feature film, "Green Fish" does have an amateur and raw feel. It is not as slick and well-produced as later films. However there are some beautiful images here, and some scenes that have become classics in Korean cinema.
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