Dis­cov­er the mil­i­tary thriller that put Park Chan-wook on the mapf

It is the wee hours of 28 Octo­ber, at the scene of a mul­ti­ple mur­der. Jeong Woo-jin (Shin Ha-kyun) and anoth­er man are dead, and Oh Kyung-pil (Song Kang-ho) is injured, while Lee Soo-hyuk (Lee Byung-hun), also injured, has man­aged to escape and is cur­rent­ly in cus­tody, hav­ing con­fessed to the shootings.

This is no ordi­nary crime scene, how­ev­er, but a guard house on the north side of the heav­i­ly mil­i­tarised Joint Secu­ri­ty Area between North and South Korea, both still tech­ni­cal­ly at war. A sergeant from the South leg­endary for his gun skills and for once hav­ing sin­gle-hand­ed­ly dis­man­tled a mine on which he had stepped, Soo-hyuk claims that he had been abduct­ed by the three North­ern sol­diers, and had shot his way out of their cap­tiv­i­ty in self-defence.

From the oth­er side, Kyung-pil alleges that Soo-hyuk burst into their guard post fir­ing, in an act of unpro­voked aggres­sion. So from the out­set, it is clear that Park Chan-wook’s JSA – Joint Secu­ri­ty Area is to be a DMZ-set Rashomon, as vying nar­ra­tives con­ceal a truth that nobody wants either to tell or to hear.

Amid ten­sions on both sides, an out­sider is brought in to inves­ti­gate. Major Sophie E Jean (Lee Young-ae) was born in Gene­va to a Kore­an father and rep­re­sents the Swiss and Swedish Neu­tral Nations Super­vi­so­ry Com­mis­sion. Quick to dis­cov­er that one bul­let is miss­ing from the scene, and that the gun from which most of the oth­er bul­lets were fired belonged not to Soo-hyuk but to his fel­low bor­der guard Pri­vate Nam Sung-sik (Kim Tae-woo), Sophie finds her­self in the mid­dle of a high­ly com­bustible sit­u­a­tion where the evi­dence points in dif­fer­ent direc­tions and every­thing – even enmi­ty and the very notion of neu­tral­i­ty – is illusory.

A series of flash­backs, cov­er­ing many months, grad­u­al­ly reveals the inter­con­nec­tions between the men in the guard house shootout, whose evolv­ing friend­ship across bor­ders rep­re­sents the great­est threat to the con­ve­nient myths of a wartime dis­pen­sa­tion. Mean­while, Sophie will also learn that she her­self shares – even embod­ies – the divid­ed his­to­ry of these two nations.

“What is it? Have I got some­thing on my face?” asks Soo-hyuk’s girl­friend, Soo-jung, who has just casu­al­ly men­tioned to Sophie that she is also Sung-sik’s sis­ter. As she utters her ques­tions to Sophie, Soo-jung does very lit­er­al­ly have some­thing on her face – a giant goril­la mask that she has just pulled on for a stage per­for­mance. Indeed, the whole of JSA plays out like a mas­quer­ade. The sto­ries that peo­ple tell about their encoun­ters along the fron­tier are inevitably par­ti­san, giv­en the extreme polar­i­sa­tion that the bor­der rep­re­sents, and the strict penal­ties against frater­ni­sa­tion of any kind.

Yet ever so slow­ly, all this is exposed to be a cha­rade, as four men from either side of the divide cre­ate, how­ev­er tem­porar­i­ly, an illic­it zone of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and cama­raderie, reci­procity and respect, whose very exis­tence belies the premise upon which the sep­a­ra­tion of states is found­ed. Here, in a rever­sal of nar­ra­tive con­ven­tion, it is not the dis­rup­tion of order but rather its resti­tu­tion that results in real tragedy for a suc­ces­sion of char­ac­ters, as Park Chan-wook​’s film illus­trates the absur­di­ties of the ongo­ing North/​South conflict.

The terms of war may be decid­ed by high­er pow­ers, but it is the low­er ranks who are expect­ed to toe the line on pain of death. And while the bor­der that runs through the mid­dle of the film is very real, it also takes on a fig­u­ra­tive aspect, mark­ing addi­tion­al bound­aries of nation­al­i­ty (Sophie is half-Kore­an, half-Swiss), sex­u­al­i­ty (there are hints that Sung-sik is gay) and gen­der (Sophie is told she is ​“the first female staff at JSA since 1953”).

JSA offers a pic­ture of arbi­trary bar­ri­ers, and the pun­ish­ments for those who cross them, but it also sug­gests that this pic­ture con­ceals as much as it reveals, con­tain­ing a secret his­to­ry of resis­tance and trans­gres­sion for those with eyes to see and decode a truth hid­den in plain sight. As such, its final image – a pho­to­graph whose many details are brought into sharp focus – aligns it with the end of Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing and its own encrypt­ed pho­to­graph from the past. For a tourist’s pho­to, whose sig­nif­i­cance will inevitably be lost on its tak­er is recon­tex­tu­alised to cap­ture a lost con­nec­tion in a divid­ed space and time.

Released in 2000, in the bor­der­land between two mil­len­nia, JSA was not Park’s first fea­ture – but it was the film that would put his name on the map, set­ting a new box-office record in South Korea and paving the way for his rise to become one of the key fig­ures in the Kore­an Wave, lead­ing to his so-called ​‘Vengeance tril­o­gy’, includ­ing 2003’s Old­boy. Twen­ty years on, it’s hard to say that much has changed between the two Kore­as, still trag­i­cal­ly uni­fied in a sym­met­ri­cal hos­til­i­ty that tears every­one apart from them­selves and each other.

JSA – Joint Secu­ri­ty Area is avail­able on Blu-ray in High Def­i­n­i­tion pre­sen­ta­tion from Arrow Home Video on 18 January.