Summary
South Korea’s Gunsan Military Camp Town gets a sharp focus in this unconventional romance as glimpsed through the lens of systemic social injustice.
There were dozens of ‘America Towns’ across South Korea from the 1950s to the 1990s. Providing bars and sex workers to the US troops, the regulation of prostitution in these townships tread a contradictory line. Director Jeon Soo-il’s AMERICA TOWN explores a couple of lives on the fringes, living and loving under a system that didn’t accept (partial) culpability until last year.
Working at his father’s photo studio in the 1980s, Sang-kook (Kim Dan-yul) develops nude photos in secret for schoolmates and soldiers alike. His world is opened up when bar hostess Young-lim (Lim Chae-young) comes into the shop for an ID photo. Photos aren’t the only thing developing as a kind of romance blooms between the two, despite the harsh injustices of a system designed to subjugate.
This period of military rule is at sharp odds with the modern South Korea, which is what makes Jeon Soo-il’s film so powerful. There’s a constant US military presence in almost every scene. As Sang-kook and Young-Lim try to escape their destinies, one continually questions what coming of age must be like in an environment such as this. Permits were issued for sanitation checks, tacitly condoning prostitution for the troops but condemning the women for contracting diseases from the soldiers. This permission of the “other” is simply and bleakly depicted as a way of life.
The young actor Kim Dan-yul is a phenomenal find, embodying the sentiment of a nation. There’s one scene where his character of Sang-kook sits outside Young-Lim’s room as she works, his hands clasped firmly over his ears. It’s as good an analogy as any. His difficult relationship with his own father is almost representative of a nation, as the latter keeps trying for an inter-Korea reunion with his family from the North. Lim Chae-young plays a woman with a fate as tragic as anything in a Kenji Mizoguchi classic.
Cinematographer Park Sung-hun provides viewers with an abundance of nocturnal photography of the frozen town. The camera lingers long on Lim Chae-young eating apples, bathed in the pink light of sex and the night. At other times, when Jeon Soo-il wants to depict the reality of women’s treatment, it’s a stark set of greys and blues that fill the palette. It’s almost perpetually pre-dawn/dusk in Gunsan Military Camp Town.
AMERICA TOWN ends with a shot of the Centre for the Control of Social Disease, an institution where the US military would detain women they thought to be ill. It was colloquially known as the “monkey house.” As Sang-kook weeps at his inability to enable change, Jeon Soo-il’s film is not so much a film where the message about the treatment of women is unsubtle, it’s just plainly stated.
2017 | South Korea | DIR: Jeon Soo-il | WRITER: Jeon Soo-il | CAST:Kim Dan-yul, Lee Chae-young, Kim Se-jin | DISTRIBUTOR: Sydney Film Festival 2018 | RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 14 June 2018 (SFF)
