Burn­ing – first look review

It’s been eight very long years since South Kore­an film­mak­er Lee Chang-dong gift­ed us with a fea­ture (2010’s Poet­ry), but we’re thrilled to report that he’s back on the scene with an absolute­ly mon­u­men­tal new work. Based on a short sto­ry by Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Burn­ing is a slow burn in both struc­ture and theme, in that it metic­u­lous­ly unfurls over two-and-a-half nerve-jan­gling hours, and one of the cen­tral char­ac­ters hap­pens to be a week­end arsonist.

Hugh emo­tion­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal div­i­dends are paid to the view­er who drinks in the detail which Lee lav­ish­ly (though care­ful­ly) serves up – it’s one of those films where every frame is fine­ly cal­i­brat­ed for max­i­mum effect and mean­ing. It’s not self-con­scious­ly arty, nor does it fol­low any par­tic­u­lar­ly pre­ten­tious lines of inquiry, but every ele­ment is used as a tool to expand the dra­ma – what rooms look like, the clothes worn by the char­ac­ters at cer­tain times, which cars are dri­ven, how far one loca­tion is from anoth­er. All of this is chan­neled into the film’s dev­as­tat­ing and cathar­tic final act.

Jong­soo (Yoo Ah-in) is a gorm­less, odd-job­bing drifter whose embit­tered father is doing time for an assault. In the film’s open­ing scene he bumps into a young woman from his home­town, Hae­mi (Jeon Jong-seo), who is so deep in cred­it card debt that she is work­ing as a kind of pub­lic cheer­leader for a cor­po­rate brand. He ini­tial­ly doesn’t remem­ber her, but she jogs his mem­o­ry with tall tales of their youth. Their first ​“date” involves stand­ing in a dank alley­way while smok­ing, which leads to them quite lit­er­al­ly swap spit as they drib­ble phlegm into a lit­tle espres­so cup between drags.

Mat­ters move quick­ly, and she announces her depar­ture for Kenya on a safari hol­i­day. Jong­soo agrees to feed her cat, Boil, while she’s away, pos­si­bly because she asks pri­or to a bout of awk­ward sex. He maybe doesn’t realise just how much, but he’s in love, and as such uses her cramped stu­dio pad to plea­sure him­self in a num­ber of strange ways – one of which involves mas­tur­bat­ing while star­ing long­ing­ly at a TV ari­al. Hae­mi returns, but she’s now got a new play­mate called Ben (Steven Yeun) who has a immac­u­late­ly coiffed goa­tee, dri­ves a Porsche 911 and lives in a com­i­cal­ly min­i­mal­ist design­er pad. It feels as if Jong­soo is being pun­ished for being poor and unre­fined, but Hae­mi is coquet­tish­ly ambigu­ous as to whether she actu­al­ly has (or had) feel­ings for him.

This intri­cate, three-han­der shifts up a gear after about the 90 minute mark to become a much dark­er study of a obses­sion and the des­per­ate search for an elu­sive truth. At one moment it’s a tale of humil­i­a­tion and unre­quit­ed love, as the near-mono­syl­lab­ic Jong­soo dogged­ly attempts to dis­cov­er whether he has a chance with Hae­mi now that the suave and world­ly Ben is on the scene. Then it turns into a kind of exis­ten­tial crime sto­ry, as Jongsoo’s fix­a­tion leads him to adopt a set of new life pat­terns as a way to gath­er evi­dence. And if there’s a fourth main char­ac­ter, it’s an ultra-shy grey cat named Boil who ends up pro­vid­ing the film with its deci­sive plot pivot.

Burn­ing, then, is the full pack­age, tan­gling with old school genre while also rip­pling with lit­er­ary por­tent and offer­ing a stark pic­ture of eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty in South Korea. When boiled down, the film feels like an indict­ment of class stric­ture, and even Haemi’s choice of lover seems to dou­ble as a bina­ry deci­sion for cosy squalor or fast-tracked upward mobil­i­ty. A cen­tral scene where she sways, ban­shee-like to Miles Davis against the mag­ic hour, with the North Kore­an bor­der sit­ting right in the mid­dle dis­tance, is one for the ages.