FNC 2009: THE RED CHAPEL Review

And now for something completely different... here's Mads Brügger's unbelievable documentary The Red Chapel ! Imagine this, if you can : a filmmaker with the project of denouncing the destructive dictatorship of North Korea packs his bags for the totalitarist country where he pretends to be a theater director hoping to present a typically Danish play. Along with him are two South Korean comedians, including one who's handicaped and, for obvious reasons, gains a lot of attention around him. The three jokers are not afraid to ridicule Kim Jong-il's system , its spirit of propaganda and the population struggling through it. By doing so, they have to make sure not to get caught, even if that includes filming only images that show the true face of the country. Such point makes The Red Chapel even more mesmerizing. Everything that we see has been approved by a committee who suprisingly never discovered what was truly going on. If this film had been made anywhere else in the world, we could think we're dealing with a mockumentary, but with the certitude of veracity The Red Chapel carries, we get a unique portrait of a mysterious country and an exemple of audacious cinema that would make Werner Herzog proud. 

It seemed impossible for a film to live up to such premise, but The Red Chapel truly delivers by giving us an hilarious trip to a place very few people will ever go. The game Brügger and his friends are playing gives birth to many funny scenes to which the suspense of hoping not to be discovered adds an exciting dimension. Many scenes we wouldn't dare to spoil here have to be seen to be believed and the whole situation is so unbelievably funny, weird and maybe just ridiculously dangerous, we can only recommand it. You haven't seen anything like this in years. 

Of course, the documentary raises a lot of questions on ethic and we could rightly criticize Mads Brügger to make fun of poor people stuck in a sitution they'll never get out of. Lying to its subjects is a big tabou, but in the case of The Red Chapel, it could be interpretated as an extreme way to denounce totalitarism from which we get a different and new perspective. The filmmaker's tactics, as subversive as they can be, do allow him to capture some moment of haunting human desperation he probably would not have gotten otherwise. Just like the films of Michael Moore, The Red Chapel is a polemic piece of work that is bound to create many conversations on the subject and its form. It is a film to discover.