Summary
A knowing, irreverent and deeply dark comedy about filmmaking. But it’s also about ego, secrets, and spiders. I hate spiders.
Beginning with The Quiet Family in 1998, Kim Jee-Woon’s remarkably dark comic streak and refined sense of cinema has earned him a legion of fans. It’s continued through crossover hits like A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008) and I Saw the Devil (2010). Now, with COBWEB (거미집), Kim combines that love of cinema and black comedy by taking us through a rarely seen slice of South Korean cinema history.
During the 1970s, where Kim and co-writer Shin Youn-Shick lays our scene, South Korean cinema censorship reaches its peak under President Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian “Yusin System.” Films were laden with party policy (that is, government propaganda), and anyone who attempted to circumvent these rules would be blacklisted by the government.
In Kim’s film, director Kim Ki-yeol (Song Kang-ho) is plagued. He has just finished shooting his latest project, but a recurring dream convinces him that reshoots will turn it into a masterpiece. Taunted by critics and haunted by the shadow of deceased mentor Director Shin, he goes against studio boss Baek’s (Jang Young-nam) express wishes and calls back the cast for secret reshoots. It all has to be done in less than 2 days.
Enlisting the help of Mido (Jeon Yeo-been), heir apparent to the studio with no obvious qualification but her passion, he soon finds that the drama is happening all around him. Philandering star Ho-se (Oh Jung-se) is overwrought with emotion due to the pregnancy of Yu-rim (Krystal Jung), the apparent result of their on-set affair. The latter is being a diva, making unreasonable demands. In fact, all of them are hiding secrets, something a method actor playing a detective begins to deduce.
Highly self-referential and filled with inky dark humour, COBWEB is as tangled a lattice as its title would imply. The real-life Kim plays it all out in duelling narratives. There are the events of the set, ones that involve everything from plying officials with alcohol to internal squabbling. Both Kim Ki-yeol and Mido fancy themselves as actors at various points, and the results are deliberately terrible and hilarious.
Then there’s the film within a film, a black and white piece shot on lavish sets with soap opera plotting. The faux film is overwrought, a real melodrama of the highest order. Yet it’s done with such loving and knowing references that you’ll want to go back and check out the films of Kim Ho-Sun or Shin Sang-ok, the latter of whom was kidnapped by North Korea following the revocation of his South Korean filmmaking license.
At times it’s chaos on wheels, running at a frenetic energy that fills all 135 minutes of this intense bubble. This is especially true of the big finale, built around a single-shot climax that the fictional Kim is determined to complete. From the moment he yells action, it’s a flurry of movement. As an audience, we desperately want to see it work but are waiting for the penny to drop.
The closing moments of COBWEB play out the crucial scene in full, bringing the fictional film to a close inside the one we are watching. In one of the more meta moments, the festival audience I watched this with started applauding just as the credits rolled, only to see a vision of a faux audience doing the same. So, this is either a clever commentary on the participatory nature of film, or Kim just having some fun with us. Either way, it’s a wickedly joyful way to spend a few hours.
2023 | South Korea | DIRECTOR: Kim Jee-Woon | WRITER: Shin Yeon-shick | CAST: Song Kang-ho, Lim Soo-jung, Oh Jung-se, Krystal Jung | DISTRIBUTOR: Sydney Film Festival 2023 | RUNNING TIME: 134 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 7-18 June 2023 (SFF 2023)
