Burning and Shoplifters: Is There A Better Way to Represent the Underdog?

By Li Zhuang

It is exhilarating to see that more and more renowned East Asian directors have started to pay attention to the underdogs of society: the poor, the invisible, the lonely and isolated group, educated or uneducated. Among the films premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, Burning by South Korean director Lee Chang Dong and Shoplifters by the more popular and more well-known Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda caught my attention. It is not surprising that it was Shoplifters that took away the Palme d'Or. It is even less surprising that Shoplifters got more publicized and thereby more popular among the American audience, given the fact that Japanese cultural products are generally doing so much better than the Korean ones. List the Japanese authors I have read or heard of, I would say Murakami, Basho, Yukio Mishima (though I personally hate him), Dasai Osamu, Ryūnosuke Akutagaywa, to name just a few. List the Korean authors I have read, I would say, um, literally none. There are numerous reason behind this, be it cultural, political, and economic.

But it becomes more serious when even my mom chooses Kore-eda over Lee Chang Dong, after I helped her download the two Chinese dubbed films from an online website. Mom is 51, a Chinese housewife who loves to cook radish and pork chops in soup and whose favorite writer is Murakami. On weekend nights after dinner, there would be a family ritual: mom would pour some rose-coloured Woolong tea from her favorite Japanese tea set and we would watch a movie together. Mom usually shares my aesthetics about movies and loves what I love. But this time, she didn’t pick the movie I endorsed with great enthusiasm over the phone. She loves Shoplifters since it tells a complete story while Burning does not. She says when the female lead Hae-mi starts dancing, she doesn’t understand why.

It is true that Burning is a less welcoming and audience-friendly film. Too much symbolism that is hard to catch and even harder to decipher. Narrative is fragmented and ambiguous. You might not get out of the movie theatre feeling contented. Instead you feel like something is lost and you are desperate to grasp it. The feeling that you are piecing together a mosaic, and there are always parts missing and parts that are do not fit. You throw away the whole thing, feeling angry and frustrated. Lee Chang Dong, what an unpleasant man.

Surely, he is not a pleasant man who gives you every answer you need after a film. He never answers questions. When you ask for answers, you only find more questions thrown at you. You stamp your feet since your brain is not designed to function that way. It prefers clarity over chaos. So what did we get from this bizarre and bewildering film? Lee Jong-su, a recent college graduate who studies creative writing and can’t find a decent job to feed himself. A proper warning for all MFA candidates, myself included. So what does he do? He goes back to his father’s place at a rural Korean village not far from Seoul, and he drives his father’s rusty truck everywhere. And he reunites with his high school classmate Hae-mi and a romance is about to begin. But this girl goes to Africa and brings back a guy that drives a Porsche. Surprise, surprise. I could imagine many pairs of eyes rolling in the dark cinema. A typical Korean movie drama with a dark triad－a poor boy, a rich man, an attractive girl—and I thought Lee Chang Dong had imagination. Just as I was trying to drag myself up and get the hell out of the cinema, things turned downhill in rocket speed: the girl went missing. You might ask me: what, so she just disappears? Indeed, just like that. No foreshadowing. Nothing. Just disappeared without a trace. I stopped filling my mouth with caramel popcorn.

Then everything is put into question. Does Hae-mi’s cat exist? Jong-su comes to Hae-mi’s apartment everyday to fill up the food bowl and clean up the litter. But he never sees the cat himself. So is there a cat? And Haemi tells Jongsu that when they were young, Jongsu saved her from the bottom of a dry well one time. Jongsu asks everybody whether the well exists. The leader of the village says no. Hae-mi’s mother and sister say no. The only person who remembers it is Jong-su’s mother who left his son when he was young. So is there a well? Is the memory real? Then, the next key question becomes is Hae-mi real? Mom doesn’t understand why Jong-su is so desperate to find out the truth about the well incident. But I understand. When someone disappears all of a sudden, it puts everything into question since all that is left is the memory itself, which is highly unreliable. If the memory is false then the very existence of this disappeared person becomes a question. So is Hae-mi real? Has she lived in this world for twenty three years?

Then comes the cruelty of life itself: when a girl like Hae-mi, who has no money, no fixed job, no close contact with her family suddenly disappears, nobody notices. Like a waft of wind, she disappears into the sky. Just like the deserted barns in the Korean countryside, waiting for rich guys to burn them up. Hence the title, Burning. This kind of cruelty is not sharp: it is not like the boiling water that would burn you the moment you touch it. It is lukewarm, but it haunts you day and night. It creeps in while you are asleep. It enshrouds you with this feeling of despair. When an underdog disappears, how many people notice? Like the man sleeping on the street with long and unwashed hair near your apartment. If he one day disappears, will you even notice? If you happen to notice, would you bother to do anything? Probably not. Lee Chang Dong is not lecturing you on morality or singing high praise to the marginalized and thus highly invisible groups. He tells a story without any answer and he leaves you there, angry and bewildered yet sad. And the story follows you: when you go back home and open your fridge and crack open a can of coke, a thought suddenly jumps up: a girl disappears and nobody even notices. That ends your day.

In this sense, Hirokazu Koe-eda is more benign. He doesn’t throw at you a puzzle that you cannot solve and perhaps will never solve. Nothing will haunt you after you leave the cinema. The storyline is very clear: a family of six living together and they basically survive on shoplifting. What makes this family interesting is that none of them are bonded by blood: they are total strangers living in a household that is more intimate than many other households in Japan. The concept of familial love is used like a soft halo to soften the blow of reality so that the audience could cry and laugh with the characters and still not forget to chew their popcorn. I left half of my popcorn untouched after watching Burning. I did not want to eat anymore.

There are beautiful scenes in Shoplifters, and the most memorable one is happens at seaside where the whole family is playing, jumping up and down with the waves while the old grandma is watching from the beach. Gorgeous and warm. Yet none of those scenes are as desperate and as heartbreaking as the scene in Burning where Hae-mi started dancing half-naked in the sunset after getting high from smoking marijuana. Hae-mi does not know how to dance. Yet she follows her heart and uses her limbs in a way that no professional dancers would ever be allowed. There is something primitive in this spontaneous waving and thrusting of her arms that is dangerous and attractive. For the first time, Hae-mi is liberated and she shows her self, the real Hae-mi to the sunset and to the two men sitting on the parlor. The sun disappears quickly. The men are unable to appreciate the beauty. The rich man is bored: since Hae-mi is just a prey for him, a distraction for his boring life. The poor boy is disgusted: how could a girl undress in front of two men and not feel ashamed of herself? The beauty slides away without any recognition. There is no thunderous clapping, no flowers, nothing. It remains unnoticed, just like Hae-mi herself, her whole life. It is very sad that mom didn’t get it. I very much hoped she would.