Yang Mal-bok, who delivered one of the most powerful Korean indie film performances of recent memory in The Apartment with Two Women, is back in the indie realm with the rural-set queer drama Manok, the Korean Fantastic Audience Award winner at this year's Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan).
She plays the titular Manok, a fiery middle-aged lesbian who runs what used to be a popular gay bar in Seoul. However, her cantankerous attitude has alienated her from the incoming generation of queer activists.
Rather than mend any damaged relationships and face her problems head-on, Manok decides to run away from them following the death of her estranged mother, returning to Iban-ri, the small village she grew up in, which she left years earlier. Now she is forced to face the problems of her past, including her vitriolic ex-husband, who serves as the loudmouth village chief.
While returning from the big city to the countryside might be humiliating under any circumstances, for Manok, it is even more complicated. While loud and proud back in Seoul, she never came out of the closet in Iban-ri and to this day, people there are still clueless about her sexual orientation. All save for one kindred spirit, her ex-husband's tomboyish daughter, who begins looking up to Manok, who in turn gains the courage to once more become the firebrand that she once was, when she throws her hat into the next village chief election.
Cleanly and brightly directed by Lee Yu-jin, Manok is a well-meaning and often amusing affair that empathises with Korea's ever-embattled queer community and highlights the bigotry that perpetually hounds it. Unlike the majority of Korea's queer cinema, which focuses on younger protagonists, Lee's film offers the refreshing perspective of an older gay generation, battle-hardened by decades of bigotry in Korea's highly conservative social climate.
Manok is a bitter and jaded character, and Yang plays her as someone whose years of experience have sharpened her wits but weathers her passion to deploy them in the right direction, until she returns to Iban-ri. Yang is a delight to watch, as are a number of her co-stars, including a wonderfully vile Park Wan-kyu as her blustery ex-husband.
Yet for all its good intentions, the story is also a simplistic one. This is a charming celebration about coming together to celebrate our differences, but the wishful thinking that dominates the victories of the climax causes the film to wind down on a naive note, rather than the celebratory one we might have hoped for.