While Song Il Gon’s Flower Island generated enough noise in film circles for me to recognize the name a good while ago it was not until his Spider Forest played the 2004 Toronto Film Festival that I was actually able to see one of his films for myself. Though I didn’t find Spider Forest as affecting as some it was easy to see why many were hailing Song Il Gon as one of Korea’s brightest lights. Song is a man clearly at home behind a camera, loading his films with fabulous imagery, complex ideas, rhythmic editing and a world view that continually blurs the lines between the fantastic and the factual.
Spider Forest was more than enough to flag Song Il Gon as a director to watch. Though I didn’t connect with these particular characters the film left me greatly impressed with his technical skill and convinced that if he were to step away from the mind games for a moment and focus more purely on his characters the man just might have a masterpiece in him. Enter Git.
Initially commissioned as one third of a short film anthology the response to Git was strong enough that Song Il Gon later went back and fleshed his short out into a full length feature. A deceptively simple film, Git just may be that aforementioned masterpiece. Stripping his story back to the bare essentials Song has hit on a perfect merger of style and substance, a film that showcases his flawless eye for composition and indulges his fondness for fantasy and dreams while still remaining firmly rooted in the emotional reality of his lead characters.
The film opens with a monologue from a young film maker looking back on his first, lost love. Hey! Stop groaning! This is NOT one of those self indulgent “look at me I’m a tortured artist” films. Having just completed his first film, one he freely describes as mediocre, he is supposed to be preparing a draft of his next script. But, feeling restless and perhaps a little lost, he is instead on a boat, heading for a motel on a remote island where, ten years earlier, he once vacationed with his first girlfriend, now married and living in Germany. Why? At the time they swore to meet there again in ten years time and he is keeping that date knowing full well that she is not likely to turn up. The motel has only two other residents: an aspiring dancer fully ten years our director’s junior who does virtually all of the day to day work and her uncle, the motel’s owner who has been completely non-verbal since his wife left him without warning or explanation some years earlier. And that is basically the film: a man waiting for a past he knows will never return to him while building new relationships with the motel’s staff and generally not getting any work done.
What makes Git work so well is precisely the same thing that makes 3 Iron – a film very similar in tone – work. Song Il Gon understands that there is power in simplicity. His two primary leads turn in simply fantastic performances with looks and gestures loaded with just as much meaning as any of the dialogue. Song’s script is masterfully constructed with no waste whatsoever: every word, every image contributes to the overall effect. His remote island location is starkly beautiful and shot to great effect – there are more startlingly beautiful images than you can count – with occasional forays into the characters’ memories and dreams woven seamlessly in until the ‘real’ world is thoroughly infused with the possibility of the fantastic.
In the hands of a lesser director, particularly in Korea where they seem to love nothing more than grandly overstated sentimentality, Git would be a sickly sweet mess, a great big glob of half melted cotton candy. In the hands of Song Il Gon it is a minor masterpiece.