Welcome to Dongmakgol first published by Film4, 30 Nov 2006
Though the violent conflict between Koreans of the North and South may have dissolved into a fragile ceasefire in 1953, it has never been officially declared over, but rather continues to this day as a cold war dividing the Peninsula and its people in half. Over the last decade, South Korean cinema has begun to prod at this still open wound in the national consciousness. Jang Jin’s The Spy (1999), Kang Je-gyu’s Shiri (1999), Park Chan-wook’s JSA (2000) and Kim Ki-duk’s The Coast Guard (2002) all explored contemporary North/South tensions; and then along came Kang Je-gyu’s sweeping civil war epic TaeGukGi (2004), which addressed with an unprecedented directness the bloody 1950-1953 period – and which went on to become the Republic’s highest grossing film of all time. Now Park Kwang-hyun’s feature debut Welcome To Dongmakgol treats the same period, but moves from TaeGukGi‘s harsh realism into altogether more allegorical terrain.
During the chaos of the US-led assault on Incheon in September 1950, fate conspires to bring three fleeing Communists soldiers (Jeong Jae-yeong, Im Ha-ryong, Ryu Deok-hwan), two men gone AWOL from the Southern forces (Shin Ha-kyun, Seo Jae-kyeong) and a downed American pilot (Steve Taschler) to the isolated mountain village of Dongmakgol, whose inhabitants live in blissful ignorance of the war around them. The soldiers quickly engage in a tense Mexican stand-off, but after one of their grenades accidentally destroys the community’s food storehouse, they agree to help rebuild and restock it, shamed into an uneasy truce by the generosity and decency of their hosts. As they work together in the fields and gradually assimilate to village life, the six men’s affection both for the community and for each other grows, until an unexpected threat from outside leads them to make a last stand for what they have truly come to value.
If the brutalities of war with which Welcome to Dongmakgol begins and ends seem real enough, Dongmakgol itself is by contrast a place of fantasy, where idealism, nostalgia and unadulterated innocence have created – perhaps literally – a heaven on earth. This quiet retreat from the rigours of combat, whose cheery denizens mistake guns for sticks and grenades for potatoes, is an agrarian utopia, offering an alternative vision of Korean brotherhood and peace amidst so much strife and tumult. It is the fragile storehouse for a nation’s dreams of a better life – and while its inhabitants are naïve to the point of madness, this is no more absurd, yet far more salutary, than the mad bloodlust both of their fellow countrymen, and of the outside forces (the US, China) that play both sides like puppets regardless of the casualties.
So Welcome to Dongmakgol is an unapologetically sentimental work, reminiscent of Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937) or Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s The Cuckoo (2003) in the way that it dresses up a humanist, anti-war message in the guise of magical realist fable. Park has accentuated the hyperreality of his Shangri-La by subtly tweaking its colours, and adding a host of computer-generated butterflies (whose significance only becomes clear towards the end) – and the director has a real eye for memorable images, whether it is the slow-motion shower of popcorn that follows the storehouse’s explosion, or the half-glimpsed onslaught of an otherworldly boar whose arrival foreshadows another external peril that will rally the soldiers in defence of the village.
Welcome to Dongmakgol features fine performances, especially from Jeong as the battle-weary ‘High Comrade’, and Kang Hye-jung (Oldboy, 2004) as crazy local girl Yeo-il. Really the only disappointment, apart from some ropey CGI in the climactic battle sequence, is the overwhelming emotionalism of Joe Hisaishi’s full orchestral soundtrack, driving an already pathos-laden film to near intolerable levels of mawkishness. Still, it is a beautiful, at times funny, and deeply affecting piece of cinema that, despite its duration of over two hours, miraculously manages never to outstay its welcome.
strap: Park Kwang-hyun’s magical realist debut feature imagines, in the midst of the Korean War, a Shangri-la well worth a visit.
Anton Bitel
