Big, big thanks to Jason Gray for passing along this review of Magician(s), the latest from Korean auteur Song Il-Gon. And now the waiting begins for a decent DVD release ...
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Yesterday was the first full day of TOKYO FILMeX (Nov. 19-27), and a strong contender for best film has already emerged. Scoring a hat trick, Magician(s) is Song Il-gon's third feature film, and the third to screen in competition at the festival (preceded by Flower Island in 2001, and Spider Forest last year). One of two Korean film vying for the top prize (the other being Kang Yi-kwan's Sakwa), Magician(s) has had two lives: one as a 30-minute short film as part of the Jeonju International Film Festival's "Short Digital Films by Three Filmmakers" omnibus series, and now as a 95-minute feature, transferred to 35mm film.
**Mild Spoilers Follow**
New Year's Eve. Somewhere in the wintry woods on the side of a mountain, a woman appears out of the darkness and makes her way down to a cabin-like bar, weaving between trees like she's drunk or high. Ja-eun is actually dead. Her three friends are gathering at the bar to commemorate the third anniversary of her suicide, and she's come to check out the festivities for herself. They were all members of the now-defunct band "Magician." After losing Ja-eun, their emotionally and chemically troubled guitarist, they called it quits, but so many feelings have been left unresolved. This movie is those feelings.
The owner of the wooden watering hole is also the band's ex-drummer and Ja-eun's ex-boyfriend. He's gregarious and not one for soul-searching but deep inside he's devastated that he couldn't save Ja-eun from self-destruction. Jang Hyeon-seong (Shiri, and Song's own Spider Forest), plays the band's somewhat tortured bassist and songwriter. He's ready to pack his bags for Argentina unless he can finally convince the band's songbird (Kang Kyeong-Heon, also in Spider Forest) to end her self-imposed ban on singing once and for all, but she has serious guilt about Ja-eun's death to purge before that can happen. Then there's Ja-Eun herself, played by Lee Seung-Bi. Other than her own in-the-past scenes, her performance is wordless. She ducks and dances in and out of frame, reacting to everything going on in her name, sweetly smiling at or petting characters when they're nice, pretending to hit them when they're not, sometimes leading the camera along like it's wrapped around her little finger. Like a dead loved-one, she's invisible to everyone around her, but with them wherever they go.
There is a fifth cast member – a buddhist monk who comes to the bar to collect his snowboard after a three-year stint at the temple further up the mountain. The term "comic relief" seems to refer to things that try to be funny – the interplay between this character and the band members simply is funny (and touching.) I wouldn't be surprised if there was a separate feature film all about this character on Song Il-gon's hard drives, and if there isn't there should be.
In the q&a that followed the film, Song Il-gon gave ample credit to his "very experienced and excellent actors," going on to say that this is really "their film." He's a modest man, because Magician(s) is truly a great example of what collaboration in filmmaking can achieve on less than the budget of a Hollywood film's credit sequence. Song over-apologized for the lack of technical sheen due to shooting digitally, but the whole film has an otherworldly feel that I'm not sure film would've been right for, not to mention the impossibility of shooting it in one take.
As has been mentioned numerous times, the film was shot in a single, feature-length take. It's one beautiful long waltz between the actors and camera, made even more effective by the transitions between past and present that occur right before our eyes. They're handled not unlike the time jumps in a stage play – a character will reverse their coat, put on a necktie, or let their hair down and walk into another area of the set – and into another time period. But there are other techniques to complement it. In one scene, careful framing and Kim Bong-Soo's excellent sound design turns a colourfully-lit treehouse into an urban high-rise apartment, setting the stage for the tragedy that brings the friends together each New Year's Eve. Cinematographer Kim Meyong-jung was also frustratingly modest, saying several times that he didn't spend a lot of time thinking of how to achieve the film's single take before shooting. Song joked about he couldn't take a bathroom break or wipe his nose during filming.
Magician(s) is a film about the passion we lose as we get older, guilt over things we couldn't prevent, and friendship, and snowboarding...
As the q&a wrapped up, Song thanked FILMeX and said that Magician(s) was born out of drinking at bars with his friends, and how happy he was that Japan had a similar drinking culture.
Magician(s) truly is...do I need to say it?
Review by Jason Gray