BiFan 2024 Review: DEATH SONG, Colonial-Era Romance Sings a Lush, Eye-Poppingly Melodramatic Tune

Kim Ho-sun, one of the key directors of 1970s cinema, returned to the spotlight in the early 1990s with the sprawling period romantic epic Death Song, about the torrid affair between Korea's first professional soprano and a playwright during Korea's Japanese Colonial Era in the 1920s.

Chang Mi-hee plays Yun Sim-deok, a Korean student studying singing in Tokyo, where she befriends a group of Korean male students preparing to tour the country with a play. Among them is the aloof playwright Kim Woo-jin (Kim Sung-min), the only member of the group not openly admiring her bountiful charms.

Woo-jin eventually comes around to those charms, but since he is already married, this forces the pair down an illicit path. The pair also bond over their shared frustrations, with Sim-deok unable to find work singing the arias she loves, resorting instead to earning a living singing popular songs, while Woo-jin's political and literary desires are equally frustrated in the suffocating climate of the day.

Lush, serious and oh-so-melodramatic, Death Song begs to be taken seriously and, when it came out back in 1991, it certainly was. It was the second most successful local film of the year - behind only Im Kwon-taek's The General's Son 2 - and dominated awards shows that year, earning no less than nine gongs at the Grand Bell Film Awards.

Modern viewers, however, are unlikely to look back as kindly at the film. The film's mix of heavy-handed seriousness and outrageous melodrama is occasionally amusing for the wrong reasons but after 160 lugubrious minutes, the compounded effect is, if you'll excuse the low-hanging pun, deadening.

There's a piercing lightness to Kim Ho-sun's earlier works -- like the breezy Yeongja's Heyday and the smash hit Winter Woman, which held on to the title of most successful Korean film of all time from 1977 until two years after Death Song came out, when it was finally unseated by Seopyeonje -- which is sadly all but absent here.

What we have instead is an obsession with sophistication and high culture, although the film's at times astonishingly bad ADR turns Sim-deok's beautiful arias into bizarre and unintentional pastiche. The film's intended emotional peaks, among them a stirring and defiant rendition of her famous song 'Hymn of Death' -- another translation for the film's title -- at a Japanese banquet, don't quite land the way that they are intended to.

While Death Song was made in the twilight of Director Kim's career -- he would reunite with Chang for his swan song Henequen in 1996, another award-winning period drama -- it does feature the early participation of a few names who would soon bring the Korean film industry into the future.

These include a youthful appearance by actor Lee Gyoung-young; assistant director Kwon Chil-in, who went on to make Singles and several other films; and junior producer Shim Jae-myung, who later set up Myung Films on her way to becoming one of the most influential producers of Korean film history.

The tragic love story of Yun and Kim was previously dramatised in the 1969 film Yun Sim-deok and was most recently brought to the screen in the six-part television series The Hymn of Death in 2018, starring Shin Hye-sun and Lee Jong-suk as the ill-fated couple.

Though it is ultimately far too long and shimmeringly melodramatic, Death Song is also a frequently arresting snapshot of a curious episode unspooling during a particularly trying moment in Korean history. If you're not familiar with the true life story, try not to read up on it beforehand as the ending, whether you like it or not, is surely one of the picture's most memorable attributes.

If you really must watch a Colonial Era Korean romance featuring eccentric true-life artists made in the 1990s, you may want to opt for 1995's My Dear Keumhong instead.