Zhang Lu’s elusive Love And… was the brave choice to close the 2015 London Korean Film Festival. His latest feature is the first of the festival’s 2017 “teaser” screenings.
A Quiet Dream (춘몽)
Director Zhang Lu, 2016, 101 mins
Cast: Han Yeri, Yang Ik-june, Park Jung-bum, Yoon Jong-bin
Monday 20 March 2017, 7:30pm
Regent Street Cinema | Book tickets hereAs Part of the London Korean Film Festival: Teaser Screenings
Internationally acclaimed director Zhang Lu’s 11th feature film, A Quiet Dream revolves around the everyday lives of four friends – a young woman and three less-than-ordinary men. Yeri, the Chinese Korean immigrant, cares for her paralysed father whilst running the small ‘Hometown Bar’ in the impoverished Su-saek neighbourhood of Seoul. Ik-june is a former small-time gangster expelled for laughing during his boss’s funeral; Jong-bin is the milk-drinking, epileptic son of the Hometown Bar’s landlord and Jung-bum is an introverted North Korean defector who suffers from depression.
This film doesn’t follow a conventional narrative structure, but rather unfolds quietly as if taken from a small segment of their everyday lives, lives that are spent hanging out at Yeri’s bar. Although each has their own complex issues to deal with, they somehow muddle through with little more than friendship and laughter.
An interesting element to this film can be seen with the three male characters who are played by a trio of prominent Korean film directors of the same name. Each of the directors steps in front of the camera for A Quiet Dream to play a character that they had previously created in their earlier films, namely: Yang Ik-june from Breathless (2008), Yoon Jong-bin from The Unforgiven (2005) and Park Jung-bum from The Journals of Musan (2010). This adds to the film’s dreamy and mysterious texture, blurring the line between fantasy and what’s on screen and the reality outside of the screen.
Much lauded, the film opened last year’s Busan International Film Festival and was invited to the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2017.
(automatically generated) Read LKL’s review of this event here.
I found this much more engaging than his dreadful “Love and …” that closed the 2015 London Korean Film Festival. While nothing to write home about, it is a gentle movie in the Hong Sang-soo vein, with its USP being that the three male actors are also directors in their own right.
Catch it if you can, but don’t make a special effort. 2.5 / 5
Update (6 Aug 2017): James Mudge at Eastern Kicks articulates a similar message, but with a more generous score: http://www.easternkicks.com/reviews/a-quiet-dream