Burning

A slow-burning mystery about economics, class, and sexual jealousy. And cats.

For a long time, I've wanted to tell a story about young people, and in particular, the young people of this generation. Some of my past projects were named Project Rage. That was because it seems that today, people all over the world, regardless of their nationality, religion, and social status, are angry for different reasons. The rage of young people is a particularly pressing problem. The millennials living in Korea today will be the first generation that are worse off than their parents' generation. They feel that the future will not change significantly. Not able to find the object to direct their rage at, they feel a sense of debilitation. This film is about young people who feel impotent, with rage bottled up inside them.

• Lee Chang-dong; "Burning Director Lee Chang-dong: Still Angry After All These Years" (Patrick Frater); Variety (December 3, 2018)

A thriller about a missing person. An allegory of class division. A study of generational alienation. A fable about modern consumerism. A dramatisation of psychological breakdown and genetically inherited rage. An analysis of socio-economic disenfranchisement. A critique of toxic masculinity and its concomitant misogyny. A condemnation of middle-class gentrification. A threnody for a traditional Korea that's slowly being replaced by faceless cosmopolitanism. An extended rib on Schrödinger's cat. The story of an impoverished novelist-wannabe, a yuppie pyromaniac, and the strange woman that brings them together, then tears them apart. Beoning [Burning] is all of these. And none of them. This is a narrative fundamentally built on questions, very few of which are answered definitively.

In his first film in eight years, writer/director Lee Chang-dong (Oasis; Secret Sunshine; Poetry) begins this protean narrative as an almost John Hughes-esque teen romance, before shifting gears into a story of sexual a...

Burning singes its psychological character study with a thrillingly igneous mystery. The cosmic fires of the sun. Its radiance encapsulating our world with warmth and tenderness. The perfect distance for sustainability. Equilibrium. Its rich beating rays corrupting the impressionable youth, granting life in the most deciduous souls. The Sun sets. And much like its vanishing point, the resonance of its warmth dissipates, only leaving numbing bitterness.

Chang-Dong’s adaptation of Murakami’s ‘Barn Burning’ is an arresting piece of psychology. An ambiguous analysis perceiving the wealthy to emotionally manipulate the aspiring, culminating into a study on the human condition. A complex aura of social anatomisation that defies the genres that are seamlessly blended. A story not entirely based on the perspective of the naive Jongsu, who faces solitude due to his mother abandoning him and father incarcerated. Neither does it revolve around the suggestible Haemi and her eternal yearning for disappearance as she travels to Kenya. Nor the ominous Ben, arriving back with Haemi after her trip, confessing his hobby for frequently burning down greenhouses.

The enigmatic exploration comes from the gaps in between these surreptitious characters. The bonds they develop. Thematically, Burning is an endeavour in illustrating envy. The young envious of the rich. The lonely desirous of relationships. The insatiable hunger for perishing one’s soul. A contemporary strand of human nature that is derived from Chang-Dong’s acute screenplay. Substituting elongated conversations for hypnotising scenes of visual splendour, exercising his artistic flair for storytelling. Haemi, whilst enthused by marijuana, joyously dancing against the backdrop of the twilight sky in a one-take sequence. Not only does this depict her thirst for vanishment, as she sways to her claimed “Great Hunger” dance, but her eternal solidarity as the Sun sets in front of her darkened silhouette.

In fact, Chang-Dong...