I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I
a) Live in South Korea
b) Love movies.
If you don’t, you were just gifted the information in list form. Consider yourself blessed.
Having been here for over 10 months now (I am the kind of person who is obsessed with personal markers, milestones and anniversaries so you better get used to them baby), I really should have been haunting cinemas and gorging on K-cinema every day with worrying enthusiasm. But aside from the MASSIVE PANDEMIC that kinda buggered up going to the cinema (Covid-19, don’t know if you’ve heard of it?), I am also extremely lazy, with a habit of watching things I’ve already seen instead of actually trying something new. For example, I am absolutely definitely not rewatching all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (totally not on season 4 and haven’t just rewatched ‘Hush’. Absolutely not). But that’s what this blog is for. A vague attempt at being interesting.
So this evening, having gotten out of work 40 minutes early because all of the students for my last class are away (thank the heavens, they are hardly diligent geniuses, sorry not sorry), I stopped into a small casual restaurant for my standard budaejjigae (spicy sausage stew, it’s basically my bloodstream now) and came home. I wondered what to do with myself. After staring at the ceiling and into my phone for 40 minutes of course, I’m not a savage. Trying to resist the urge to definitely not watch more Buffy, I glanced at my emails and looked more closely at those received from the UK Korean Cultural Centre (KCCUK). I love the KCCUK: they are the institution that first taught me Korean on a cheap, yearlong course, they do awesome exhibitions and they essentially are a significant part in me loving Korean culture as much as I do. They have done amazing work during lockdown in the UK (what arts organisation hasn’t?) and currently their film team is curating a season on confinement in Korean cinema (http://koreanfilm.co.uk/site/korean-film-nights-2020/trapped-the-cinema-of-confinement). As with so many emails like this, I looked at them, thought ‘wow, that’s amazing, definitely look into that!’ and promptly forgot they existed. But not tonight baby! I have free time, and should probably leave Sunnydale for a while. So eventually I settled, kind of by accident because of that annoying autoplay function I keep forgetting to turn off, on the 1995 Park Chul-Soo film 301/302. All I knew going in was that it was about two women (yay, females!) and that it fit with the theme of confinement. Come at me random Korean movie, I thought. Without further ado (and Jesus how much more ado can there be?), here’s my little review of this sudden night time movie choice.
Well, hoo, boy, it’s a humdinger. If you have no intention of learning nothing other than whether or not I liked it, BABY I LIKED IT. The 301/302 of the title refers to the numbers of two neighbouring apartments inhabited by two women, one a recent divorcee and enthusiastic chef (301), and the other (302) a traumatised writer with a severe eating disorder (I believe in the film it’s labelled as anorexia, though it manifests more as instinctively throwing up after eating anything at all). We start at the end of the film when 302 has disappeared, and a detective is interviewing 301 as she is the last person known to have seen her. So far, so classic boring crime thriller. Even before this, in the establishing shots of the movie, there are hella knives, and more than a few shots of food being chopped and meat being sawn. Might these symbolise, or even foreshadow something? I won’t spoil anything except to say YEAH MAYBE THEY DO. In the first half hour of the movie, we flash back to 301 moving into her apartment, opposite the already established 302 who, as a definite loner, is distinctly uncomfortable with this new tenant’s presence. This discomfort is only intensified when 301 (yes you’ve guessed it I’m going to be using their apartment numbers not their names, the film defines them more strongly this way so I’m going to do so as well) starts to cook meals for her new soon-to-be friend. Except, as you may remember, 302 hates human interaction and eating any food at all. So she simply throws all of these beautifully prepared meals away. All dysfunctionally fine enough, until 301 catches 302 trying to throw the food out in a rubbish bag. And from here, the film’s intensity levels shoot up 500% percent.
After this point I don’t want to say too much about what happens in terms of the plot, but it is worth noting that, at the point where the bin bag of uneaten food is discovered, the tension was already at a point where I was gripped. Making me gripped by a bin bag is not easy to do, please trust me on that. What follows is an extremely intense psychological two hander that explores the relationship that both women have to power, men, sex and most significantly, food. The theme of ‘consumption’ pulses throughout, indicated early on when we have an amazing interplay of scenes as our anorexic 302 character types up an article on exactly how much chicken breast you can eat after a certain programme of exercise (100g). This is intercut with 301 cooking and weighing that exact amount of chicken herself as part of her own intense diet and exercise programme. This idea of consumption is very strongly tied to food throughout the story, with flashbacks showing the 301 character cooking and consuming increasing amounts of food as her husband becomes more and more detached from her, whilst 302 physically rejects it after enduring horrific trauma as a teenager living in her family butcher shop. As you can sense from this last sentence, this consumption of food has a complex and uncomfortable relationship with sex as well. It’s a testament to the film that the exploration of this relationship is not exploitative or misogynistic, instead laying its situations and ideas out starkly in a way that shocks and provokes without titillating.
As I say, I won’t spoil the story of what happens between these two women, but suffice to say it gets pretty darn intense and also very moving, despite the ending being ultimately extremely disturbing (whilst making notes for this, I wrote ‘Oh God/Oh no/Oh Lord’ about 6 times). As an exploration of the position of women in society, the film is surgically insightful- as I say these are two women whose obsession with food and weight is closely documented and who are more easily identified as numbers than as people: patriarchy much? Also, I use ‘surgically’ annoyingly deliberately, as cutting, chopping, sawing and slicing play a key role in this film. The prominence of knives here (I particularly liked the cut to 301 slicing the tip off a cucumber laid fully across the shot, immediately after discussing sex with her husband) speaks to all of the themes I’ve mentioned. Power- knives are certainly powerful objects. Consumption- knives prepare food for eating. And sex- come on now, a knife is a phallic object that can destroy things by penetrating. It’s all here. And boy there are many knives in this movie. I cannot stress this enough.
Ultimately, this film was an unsettling but great little treat, or ‘hidden gem’ as everyone seems to call films that aren’t blockbusters or romcoms. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a movie be so direct in examining the relationship between women, particularly Korean women, and food, and in its directness we can see the complexity as well as many of the absurdities surrounding this relationship. As women’s relationship with food almost always necessitates a relationship to control, so this film uses that to explore these women’s control over themselves and the world around them. You may have guessed that the movie is hardly a laugh a minute (I would probably stay away if you’re a veggie), but I’m really pleased that the KCCUK led me to stumble on it. Korean cinema continues to prove to me that it is endlessly amazing, and if you’re looking to watch a smart, female-centric psychological thriller (that is distinctly…knifey), go give 301/302 a watch.
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