Brothers In Arms
EQUAL PARTS ACTION picture, melodrama and howl of anguish, Tae Guk Gi (The Brotherhood of War) is a stupefyingly emotional film about the psychic damage wrought by war-on individuals and whole nations. Writer-director Kang Je-gyu blurs distinctions between the two. In this handsomely produced, staggeringly violent Korean War film about brothers from the South drafted into combat against the North, everything that happens to the two main characters also happens, in some imprecise but unmistakable way, to the people of both Koreas. The whole movie works simultaneously as personal narrative and as metaphor-a nifty trick that was once commonplace during Hollywood's first golden era (the 1940s) but has since become increasingly rare. It's a textbook example of foreign filmmakers treating a genre perfected by Americans (in this case, the healing nationalist blockbuster) as a toolkit that can be raided to create something fresh and culturally specific.
Like The Best Years of Our Lives, The Deer Hunter, Saving Private Ryan and other Hollywood war epics, it's an artistically ambitious, politically aggressive movie that was clearly meant to appeal to a huge popular audience. It succeeded beyond anyone's imaginings, becoming the top grossing film in South Korean history and a cultural earthquake akin to Cimino's and Spielberg's films, both of which seem to have influenced its style. (Kang is sort of a South Korean Spielberg-an artist-showman responsible for many films that broke either budget or box office records, sometimes both.) The movie's basic goal is at once provocative and therapeutic: Tae Guk Gi wants to tear open old wounds and then heal them.
Like Ryan, Tae Guk Gi encloses a past-tense narrative with present-tense brackets. In modern-day South Korea, an old war vet is told that archeologists have dug up remains that may belong to his brother. Then we flash back to the summer of 1950, five years after World War II, a conflict that ended with Korea being split in two at the behest of America and the Soviets. The carefree opening sections-tinted sepia, like the Little Italy flashbacks in The Godfather, Part II-establish the intense, almost preadolescent affection between its two main characters, the brash, handsome, cool shoemaker Jin-tae Lee (Jang Dong-gun) and his bookish, weaker kid brother, Jin-seok Lee (Won Bin). When the communist North invades the South, Jin-seok mistakenly ends up on a train that will lead him straight to the front lines. Jin-tae follows and brashly tells uniformed soldiers that Jin-seok is weak and sick and must be sent home. The soldiers are unmoved. They order both brothers to stay on the train. "Only those without arms or legs or the mute and the deaf are considered patients during war," a soldier informs them.
Once the brothers enter the war zone, the strong, silent, staunchly apolitical Jin-tae sizes up their predicament and decides Jin-seok is physically unable to handle the stress of battle. So Jin-tae resolves to become a supersoldier, volunteering for dangerous missions in hopes of winning enough medals to please his commanding officer, who has promised that instead of simply going home, a decorated combat veteran can choose to allow another man to return in his place. Jin-tae's sacrifice is compounded by the fact that he's engaged to a lovely girl named Young Shin (Lee Eun-joo). "If only one of us gets to go," Jin-tae tells Jin-seok, "I want it to be you."
The older brother's fearless machismo-he's like Audie Murphy plus Travis Bickle-drives a wedge between the men. While Jin-tae kills enemy soldiers by the bushel, cutting a swath of destruction up and down the peninsula, Jin-seok is consumed with resentment and guilt over the possibility that Jin-tae might end up dying so that he can live. He begs Jin-tae to stop volunteering himself so promiscuously. But Jin-tae doesn't listen, and in time, his kid brother comes to believe that Jin-tae is no longer the detached, rational, cool customer he was during peacetime. At the same time, almost imperceptibly, Jin-seok becomes physically stronger, eventually becoming a fighter nearly as fearsome as Jin-tae.
But neither common sense nor the passage of time can dim Jin-tae's ferocity. The war has awakened a bloodlust in him, perhaps driven him to the edge of sanity. As the war grinds on, the younger brother fears the elder has started to believe the anti-communist propaganda he once ignored or rejected. Merely by doing what he felt he had to do in order to ensure the younger brother's survival, the older brother has bought into nationalist fever and allowed it to consume and destroy him.
This is a clever, useful trope: It suggests that men who "allow" themselves to be used by their government, hoping to get closer to an impossible dream, just end up being used, period. They relinquish their self-awareness, their autonomy and whatever human qualities they once possessed, and become either cannon fodder or killing machines. Individuality gives way to groupthink. One's opponent becomes an abstraction, something less than human-not a collection of possible friends and brothers, but a shadowy mass that can be attacked without remorse.
"Sergeant Lee," a superior officer tells Jin-tae after an especially heroic mission, "You could be a soldier forever." Jin-tae's sickly smile-like De Niro's wan, damaged grin in Taxi Driver-suggests it's not a fate that one should wish on anyone.
Kang articulates this cautionary tale with confidence, muscularity and grace. He knows film history and raids it. With their folksy humor and seemingly rear-projected nighttime skies, the film's nostalgic early homestead scenes evoke John Ford's cavalry pictures (especially She Wore a Yellow Ribbon). The battlefield scenes reference Ryan, Paths of Glory, John Irvin's superb, little-seen Hamburger Hill and When Trumpets Fade and the underappreciated French World War I drama Captaine Conan. Kang's wizardly cinematographer Kyeong-hie Choi cherry-picks colors, textures, compositions and chemical processes from six decades' worth of color photography. He even double-prints frames during certain action sequences, bringing an Asian cinematic flourish full-circle. (American critics wrongly believe Spielberg invented the double-printing technique for Saving Private Ryan; it was actually used in Chinese and Hong Kong movies a full decade earlier.)
Yet the sum total of these effects amounts to far more than mere effects. Kang and his collaborators don't simply replicate images and scenes from movies that influenced them; they digest their influences and then create their own art. Tae Guk Gi may be an encyclopedia of war- movie images gleaned from around the globe. But it's not an academic exercise. Kang is not copying; he's sampling. The song is defiantly Korean.
Notice I didn't say South Korean. That's because Tae Guk Gi looks beyond the present moment, toward a distant, perhaps idealized time of reunification. The film pits brother against brother-first emotionally and then, through a combination of fantastic coincidences, physically as well. Yet Kang doesn't constrict this central metaphor until it stops breathing. It's a heavily symbolic narrative. Its characters and emotions are exact-and brilliantly acted by both leading men-but Kang nevertheless allows one to read cultural, political and poetic meanings into it. When Jin-tae asks Jin-seok, "Do you know our sacrifices?" he is a paternalistic big brother lecturing a little brother. But he might also be North Korea, which has been a spartan, communist, totalitarian slave state for more than 60 years, addressing South Korea, which for six decades has had a western, industrialized democracy (and war partner) protecting it. One is reminded that many North and South Koreans think of the war in terms of a separation of brothers, one of whom had to die (politically, spiritually or in some other way) so that the other could live.
I expect to read many brief, dismissive reviews of this movie complaining that it's corny, derivative or implausible. (How could two brothers end up serving together throughout a whole war? Well, gee, I dunno-probably the same way that Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter managed to survive several years in Vietnam playing Russian roulette professionally.) I hope critics will respond with more imagination. Once you accept its operatic contrivances-and remind yourself of how much slack you'd cut if it were a Hollywood blockbuster with handsome Anglo stars-you may marvel, as I did, at the film's sheer momentum and emotional purity. Kang is not a genteel artist-in effect, he hammered a tap into his country's heart, cranked the knob and let it bleed. Yet the result is engrossing and moving.
Tae Guk Gi bypasses academic concerns and plugs straight into one's emotions. To watch it is to understand another country's fears and dreams-an opportunity that does not come along every day.
Opens Fri., Sept. 3 at the Loews 34th Street Theater and at the Imaginasian Theater, at 239 E. 59th St. (betw. 2nd & 3rd Aves.), 212-371-6682.