Copyright B Purkayastha 2014
Sunday, 19 January 2014
Civil War
Yesterday
It all seems so far away
My brother and I used to play
Football in the street
Yesterday.
Today
Blood is in the street
Where we used to play
And he plays football with severed heads
My brother
Today.
Yesterday
Our love was like the sun of day
Now I see hate in his eyes
My brother, who was my friend
Does not know me
Today.
Tomorrow, I tell myself
Will be another day
And my brother will be
As he was yesterday
And I sometimes almost believe it
Today.
Tomorrow
Will be another day
Better than today
Perhaps, perhaps
As good as yesterday.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2014
Friday, 17 January 2014
Review: JSA Joint Security Area
In a tiny border outpost on the tensest
frontier in the world, an incident happens which leaves two men dead and two
more injured. The outpost is in North Korea, and the two dead men are both
North Korean, an officer and a private. The two injured men are both sergeants –
one a North Korean, the other a Southerner. Everyone agrees that it was the
Southerner who killed the two North Koreans and injured the third. But what was
he doing in the border outpost – and what was the reason behind the shooting?
This beautiful film is one of the most
affecting I’ve seen in a long time – a film set in what is officially still a
war, between two countries of the same people, sharing the same language,
culture, and both aching to be united; albeit under radically different and
incompatible socio-political systems.
Officially, this is a mystery thriller
about the death of the two North Korean soldiers in a border outpost; but, like two
novels I could mention (Umberto Eco’s “The Name Of The Rose” and Orhan Pamuk’s “”My
Name Is Red”) the “mystery” is merely the framework around which the story is
hung; and the story is that of the tragic and deeply affecting tale of the
separation of the two Koreas.
On patrol one night, a South Korean
military unit accidentally crosses into North Korea. One soldier is left behind
as the unit hurriedly withdraws, and he gets tangled in the tripwire of a land
mine. A couple of North Korean border guards find him and disarm the mine. This
leads to an increasing and affecting friendship between the three, who meet in
the Northern border post for cards and gossip – later between the four, because the South Korean soldier
brings along a sidekick.
In this kind of film it’s not possible to
really give spoilers, because the facts are already known; who is going to end
up dead, who will be injured, and who did what to whom. The one surviving North
Korean soldier, and the South Korean soldier who admits to the shooting, give
radically opposite and incompatible accounts of what happened, though both
agree the South Korean soldier killed the two Northerners. One of them, it
seems, has to be lying. The detective
story here is the search for a motive;
just who is lying about what happened, the South Korean or the North? Or maybe
they are both lying; and if that’s
so, why are they? What is it that both sides are so eager to hide?
It is to find out this that a female Swiss
officer of Korean ethnic origin arrives at the border between the Koreas. Let
me just summarise her role in a sentence or two, because in my opinion all she
does is act as an irrelevant distraction in the plot, and by the end is reduced
to an observer with nothing whatever to contribute. The film would have been
shorter, but otherwise completely unharmed, if she’d been left out altogether.
This isn’t the kind of film where one needs eye candy to hold the plot
together.
As an Indian, myself, I know the yearning
of separation; between the peoples of India and Pakistan, separated by
politicians and entirely artificial borders, condemned to enmity not of our doing
and indoctrinated from childhood to hate the other. That hatred is really only
possible if we don’t meet and mingle, because when we do we discover that the “other”
is just like us. That’s why nations divided against themselves detest the idea of
the people being able to meet freely. It makes hatred impossible.
And so it is in JSA. The truth the two
sides are desperate to hide, even at the cost of lying through their collective
teeth, is the simple and tragic friendship between the border guards on both
sides, men thrown apart and together out of no fault of their own, and finding
a little warmth and pleasure where they can. By day they posture at the de
facto border at Panmunjom, pretending they don’t know each other. By night they smoke, play cards, admire photos of each other's girlfriends, and scoff down cupcakes together, and play children’s games
in the woods. One only wishes it could go on forever, but one knows – because
the facts are laid out at the start – that it will end badly, and how. In the end, there is nobody who
comes out undamaged – not even the Swiss officer, whose career goes down the
drain.
Though this is a South Korean film, there’s
absolutely nothing biased about it. The South Korean military is just as
obtrusive and bullying as the Northern, the ordinary soldiers just as eager and
at the same time fearful of the “other side”, both deeply human and as deeply
conflicted. The tragedy is that so much potential happiness can be turned so
easily into unending tragedy.
About the acting, I’ll disregard the Swiss
detective and her Swedish superior officer, who chews a pipe and speaks English
with a wince-inducing accent (“Your chop is do...”). The film belongs to the
four soldiers, and most especially to Song Kang-ho who plays North Korean
sergeant Oh Kyeong-Pil and Lee Byung-Hun who plays South Korean sergeant Lee
Soo-Hyeok. The entire film is structured around the friendship of these two
men, and the final tragedy is more theirs than anyone else’s.
According to Wikipedia, Kim Jong Il was
given a copy of this by then South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun in 2007. I
wonder what Kim thought of it.
The film can be viewed online here.
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