Eight years after Poetry, the Korean Lee Chang-dong made a sensational entrance at the last Cannes Film Festival with Burning ; A political, poetic, metaphorical film, the director signs one of his greatest works, in a clever mix of genres that holds us to the end, and even beyond. Very great cinema.
On the surface, Burning has everything of a classic thriller: Jong-so (Yoo Ah In), a young unemployed Korean finds Haemi (Jeon Jong-seo), a childhood friend with whom he quickly falls in love. The couple is soon joined by Ben (Steven Yeun), a very rich young man who will quickly capture attention and bring with him a series of intrigues and destabilizing events. Because if the beginnings of Burning are very clear, the whole gradually darkens to give way to a thick fog of mystery, where reality and imagination intersect to leave a world imbued with desires, violence and bitterness.
We discover it little by little, Lee Chang-dong is far from making his film a simple thriller; what changes the game, and gives Burning such a magnetic aura, is a meticulous realization to perfection, an infinite softness of images mixed with a brutality of reality palpable at every moment. It is a clever mix between an omnipresent poetry, and an infernal cycle that carries in a spiral everything that dares to approach it. Burning is one of those films where the title resonates as a matter of course as minutes pass irretrievably for each of the characters.
Where Burning hits very right and very hard, it is by establishing from the first moments a tiny tension, which captures us without ever relaxing our attention; Without ever falling into the dramatic or the police, the plot is balanced, as if weightless in time, between a sweetness and a friction of feelings, which collide between modesty and desire. Supported by delicate and natural photography, Burning seduces and transcends. Each shot knows how to take this essential time, each movement is done slowly, to always better apprehend and tame these impressions and characters. Through the misty filters of greenhouse plastic or dust-tinted windows, every glance says a lot about thoughts, and every ray passes illuminating its part of truth. This truth is not always accessible to us: the functioning by metaphor is built slowly but skillfully, like a poetry that no longer distinguishes the real from the imaginary.
Disappear as if it had never existed. An omnipresent paradox, to which everyone has his interpretation; Each of the characters seems irremediably connected to the others by the enunciation of this metaphorical illusion. The sun's rays, the cat, the well, the plastic talons, everything disappears and reappears, even to Haemi herself; Jong-so witnesses these metamorphoses of reality in a physical impotence, and in a hunger for knowledge worthy of the "Great Hungers", those who have an insatiable need for truth and life. Fascination takes over as our own imagination invents images filled with illusions.
Between all these readings, one can't help but see Burning as an eminently political film. If Haemi slowly fades from the landscape and thoughts, it is the rivalry between the two men that gradually takes on its importance; Two social classes, easily symbolized by cars, clash and envy each other. On the one hand there is the boredom of a life without sadness and care, on the other injustice and anger, which ignite in a final desire filled with destructive impulse.
Burning burns slowly, enters our minds and sows the seeds of doubt and fascination, in an infinite poetry and a seductive aura. Lee Chang-dong hits our senses and emotions, and makes softness a fascinating force. A very great film, to discover as soon as possible.
