Korean director and writer Lee Chang-dong has had a prolific career as a filmmaker, even if he did not have the training for it earlier in his life. After switching from being an English teacher and a novelist, he has found massive success in his native country and abroad for the kind of work he does, and whom he represents on the screen. His style of filmmaking is unique in the way that shows his background as a writer, creating realistic characters, stories, and threads that carve together contemporary Korean history and society through meaningful perspectives.
Although Lee’s films have been popular among global cinema cinephiles and film festivals for decades, he had his first breakthrough in the mainstream consciousness with his 2018 release Burning. Burning stars Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, and Jeon Jeong-seo in an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story titled “Barn Burning.” It was the first Korean film to land on the Oscar shortlist for Best International Feature Film, a feat that was surpassed a year later with Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. There is a clearly defined characteristic of Burning: the pervasive sense of loneliness permeating throughout the fill, one that is not uncommon for young people in today’s world.
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Burning is told through the eyes of its protagonist, Lee Jong-su (Yoo), a working-class young man from Paju, South Korea. He wants to be a writer, but is caring for his family’s neglected cattle farm, as his father is on trial for physically assaulting a government official. The premise for this film begins when he meets Hae-mi (Jeon), a childhood friend and neighbor that moved to Seoul. Jong-su finds himself traveling back and forth from Seoul to meet up with Hae-mi, but this relationship dramatically changes when she meets a man named Ben (Yeun) in Africa. Ben is everything that Jong-su is not: he has an endless stream of wealth and quote-unquote high-class companions that Hae-mi embarrasses herself in front of during a gathering. Jong-su, on the other hand, is more of the silent and brooding type, a classic depiction of a writer.
Each of these characters wants something more out of life, even if this fact isn’t explicit. Jong-su, crumbling under the pressure of living in a place like Paju and being alone with no money, is in search of companionship. Perhaps that is why he grows so attached to Hae-mi, desperately searching for her when she disappears. Hae-mi discusses “The Great Hunger” while drunk, and searches for validation in other places, like Seoul and Africa, and people. Ben, on the other hand, despite having a mysterious source of wealth, mentions how he burns barns — which might mean killing people — to try and feel alive.
While it is ambiguous whether Hae-mi was killed or not, there are two reasons why this is not an accident. First, she is a woman, and her potentially being killed by a wealthy male stranger falls in line with gender and social commentary. Secondly, she straddles the world she came from (Paju) and an urban environment (Seoul). She even gets plastic surgery in an attempt to adjust to this new climate, but because she no longer belongs to one or the other, she pays the price.
An Environmental Sense of Isolation
Right off the bat, there is something important to note about Burning: the vast majority of the movie takes place outside of Seoul, in the area known as Paju. Located in the northern part of South Korea, right along the border of North Korea, Paju is surrounded by mountains and is largely rural. Located about an hour-long subway ride from the capital city of Seoul, where the vast majority of Korea’s population resides, the setting plays a key part. Due to migration patterns in South Korea, for younger people to be living in such a location is undesirable, adding to the unhappiness with one’s situation. The fact that Lee Jong-su, Burning’s protagonist, remains here distinguishes that he is stagnant in life: he feels stuck where he is at, which shifts even more with the disappearance of Hae-mi.
At the same time, Ben, Yeun’s character, tells Jong-su that, every month, he burns down a greenhouse. It seems to become an elaborate metaphor throughout the movie for murder, as Hae-mi disappears, and Ben seems to imply that he killed her. But as Jong-su goes out for runs, searching for a greenhouse that has been burned down, it turns out that there are a bunch of abandoned greenhouses all around his general vicinity. Outside his interactions with Hae-mi and Ben, Jong-su is surrounded by objects created by people. Despite this, he is generally alone without any humans to accompany him.
Even when he goes over Hae-mi’s house to feed her cat, the cat never appears, making Jong-su doubt it even exists besides the fact it leaves feces behind. Hae-mi is the only person to have noticed him — an ironic characteristic considering he is a novelist, someone who observes everyone else — and then she is taken out of the equation completely. Jong-su, in one scene, is seen in his home listening to world events, but he feels so far removed from the actual world that these things do not seem as relevant as they could be to him. The loneliness, the silence, and the absence of sound follow him wherever he goes, coloring his world only briefly before being stripped away.
