MIFF Session 2: COBWEB

Director Kim has just brought in his latest movie but is haunted by both past and present. In quiet moments he speaks to himself about the legacy of his mentor Director Shin and his final and fatal film. After strong first features, Kim has fallen into the critical hackverse, doling out melodramatic thrillers and romance films, like this latest one. When this actually happens in real life and a table of critics heckle him as he's trying to get through lunch. He's still being judged through Shin and whatever mojo he had has left the building. Right, then! He's got it. He's going to reshoot the ending. He wants weird setpieces and a bravura long take finale, pushing things into surrealistic horror.

There's a problem. Kim is making films in South Korea in the 1970s when, as a dictatorship, every cultural artefact produced had to be vetted and politically cleansed until it was a commercial for the regime. Loose canon artists ended up as looser canon fodder. So, Kim now has a resistance from his cast and crew, outright opposition from the Studio president, and government hatchet men are knocking at the door. Still, he has a masterpiece to make.

Jee-woon Kim whose eerie Tale of Two Sisters left me speechless and whose I Saw the Devil took the tired serial killer plot and freshened it with torture has now turned to comedy. And he has turned his comedy on to his own industry and all the targets it provides, all the foibles and and pretensions it allows, and set it during a time of social vicegrip. So this comedy is one of pressure, of staving off explosions, containing outbursts and breaking through to fashion art.

We see a fair few scenes as imagined cut sequences in black and white. The main setting is on and around the soundstage of the production (which shares its title with the overall film) where a large ensemble cast fills the screen with intrigue, gags and moments of self-aggrandisement. The film technique that keeps popping up in dialogue is plan sequence or long takes, a then fashionable means of imbuing scenes with extra realism and urgency. Kim intends a very complex long take for the finale which is being dreaded by everyone who hears about it as it involves an interior on fire and so will be a one and done ... if it works. A great many of the corridor scenes and camera reversals are long takes. What this does intermittently is to highlight the frequent sways into campy performance and makes us wonder why this tone is not kept to the histrionics of the film being shot. There's not quite enough of it to be a statement of drama offscreen and onscreen equivalence but too much to suggest it's incidental.

In the lead is Korean veteran Song Kang-ho known for recent turns in Broker and Parasite, and someone who has seen more than his share of these amtics, dealt with a trove of directors with delusions of artistic grandeur, production managers who behave like gangsters and party apparatchiks who think they're film auteurs. The parade sized cast is too long to highlight here but to say that almost everything works is not a slight, it's a recognition of a marvel.

Movies about moviemaking can be problematic with conflicts of artistic interest plaguing them from the off. At worst they descend to big, clinking statements that outgrow their own vehicles (e.g. The Stuntman). At their best (e.g. Living in Oblivion, Day for Night) they invite audiences into a kind of theme park ride of  victories had against odds. Film making is hard and expensive and gets harder and dearer the more it is meant to serve individual visions. In Cobweb, the director Kim plays the character Kim the way the latter plays his cast and various forces toward the kind of bound chaos that every control economy must become or collapse. And from the thrilling finale to the final shots of this film, we get a clear indication of the darker side of the notion of pleasing everybody, as the claim of dictatorships goes (with a bucket of confirmation bias). As such it is both sobering and bloody funny.