Editor's note: Sophia Nguyen is one of three recipients of
the Sundance Institute's Roger Ebert Fellowship for Film Criticism
for 2016. The scholarship meant she participated in the Indiewire | Sundance
Institute Fellowship for Film Criticism, a workshop at the Sundance Film
Festival for aspiring film critics started by Eric Kohn, the chief film critic
and senior editor of Indiewire.
The director Shin Sang-ok once declared that his life was
too unbelievable for a movie plot. Called the Orson Welles of South Korea, he'd
made more than 60 movies in 20 years before the government shut his studio down
in 1978; by the ‘90s, he wound up in America and at Disney, where he created
the "3 Ninjas" series under the name Simon Sheen. There was also the matter of
Shin's glittery celebrity marriage to his leading lady Choi Eun-hee, and the
scandalous affair that ended it. But most outlandish of all were the
circumstances of their reconciliation: getting abducted by North Korean agents
to make films for Kim Jong-Il.
Such a stranger-than-fiction story seemed destined for
documentary—not least because Shin and Choi had a habit of viewing life events as
film scenes. Yet none materialized until "The Lovers and the Despot,"
premiering at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Co-director Robert Cannan said in an interview with Realscreen that though the subjects "were
actually in conversations with a number of different production companies" over the years, they were protective of their story, and especially of its evidence: the
audiotape, photos, and film smuggled out of North Korea when they escaped to
the American embassy in Vienna. They collected this material not just so they
could apply for political asylum, claimed Cannan: "they did it for a possible
future film."
The pitch writes itself: a thriller and a love story; a
portrait of political and artistic megalomania; a movie about the magic of
movies. But Cannan and co-director Ross Adam never make a grab for the high
concept. A long interview with Choi forms the spine of the script, supplemented
by conversations with their children, former collaborators, and less
explicably, retired American officials. These testimonies are illustrated by
excerpts from Shin's extensive filmography, and strangely soporific
reenactments of action scenes like her kidnapping by boat, his fruitless search
in Hong Kong, and a climactic car chase.
A talking heads documentary can play a bit staid, especially
to a Sundance crowd. But the straightforward approach keeps the directors out
of the way as the tale goes from tragic melodrama to something more bizarre. On
tape, Kim lays out his ambitions to elevate North Korean cinema, complaining
about predictable crying scenes. "We don't have any films that get into film
festivals," he frets to his pet artists. The threateningly affectionate
executive producer put everyone in a paradoxical situation. They
weren't exactly told to break the ideological mold, but they were invited to
make a new one. (Later, Shin and Choi said that they introduced the first
screen kiss to the country.) Unlike in South Korea, they never had to worry
about money. They received unlimited resources, and later, permission to travel
to Eastern Europe. Shin and Choi put out 17 films in little more than two
years.
The missed opportunities show up elsewhere. Cannan and Adam
show how Choi treasures the memory of her work's rapturous reception in Moscow,
prestige and praise to a degree she'd never received. They neglect to mention
that Shin made what he considered the best film of his career, "Runaway," in
North Korea (to say nothing of the cult favorite "Pulgasari"). Readily
accepting Choi's account of living in fear and biding their time, they don't
probe the psychology of this hostage situation, or the complexities of such
creative coercion. Their interview with another artist, the nation's former
Poet Laureate, which at first seems merely out-of-place, turns out to be a
wasted opportunity. They get a good quote about the "emotional dictatorship" of
the country, and then just leave it there. The movie's myopic fix on the
thriller plot—fast-forwarding to the logistics of escape—does a disservice to
their subjects' artistry and agency.
The documentary does find the running time for an abrupt
detour into the bizarre upbringing of Kim Jong-Il. It's a perfunctory attempt
to humanize the villain, who was reportedly isolated from other children and
groomed for power since birth. He lacked the physical presence, charisma, and
political ambition of his father. As one expert explains, he was shy and loved
the cinema, and "thought of himself as an artiste." It adds up to little more
than the "frustrated creative" theory of dictators. Forget killing baby Hitler:
if only someone had encouraged his painting! This tepid compassion misses the
mark: what's needed isn't remote analysis of his psyche, but the operation of
his power.
The epilogue wants to give us goosebumps and the giggles,
and in doing so, shows its hand. One scene shows the mourning at Kim Jong-Il's
funeral, and explains the ominous consequences for inadequate grief. It's
followed by a clip from North Korea's 2001 attempt to make an international
blockbuster in the vein of "Titanic"—"Souls Protest," which failed to launch
beyond the country's orbit, is shown as pathetic and hubristic; it's also
framed as funny. But the condescension is unearned. The regime's huge public
rallies and parades display a more imaginative eye, and a deeper comprehension
of image and spectacle, than Cannan and Adam have: the synchronized
flag-twirling and banner displays are something out of a Busby Berkeley
nightmare, in living color. The shots from "Souls Protest" are mesmerizing.
These flashes of footage illuminate the questions these filmmakers never
bothered to ask: about the ideology underlying the desire to export art as a
form of soft power; about how a government attempts to control the imagination
of its people. "The Lovers and the Despot" wants to dismiss these ambitions as
the delusions of a dead man, without grasping how they connect to his dynastic
power.
The regime's atrocities are so local, and its
public figures so apparently weird, that no one knows whether to treat North
Korea as broadly dangerous or merely doomed and demented. Only last year,
threats of uncertain credibility to the United States (and to Sony), leant a
ring of moral purpose to the obnoxious adolescent comedy "The Interview." "The
Lovers and the Despot" is a symptom of a continued Western bewilderment, which
will only intensify amid recent speculation about possible missile tests. Given
the recent examples of Adam Johnson's novel The
Orphan Master's Son and Suki Kim's memoir Without You, There Is No Us, we seem content to leave the serious
stuff to literature. It's Hollywood's prerogative to render generations of Dear
Leaders as 2D cartoons and literal puppets. This British documentary has no
obligation to pay reparations.
But it should've paid more attention.
