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*This post discusses significant plot details of Na Hong-jin�s The Yellow Sea, including the revelation of what ultimately happens to the protagonist. Proceed with caution*
Then it became available to stream on Netflix and I was like, �Shit, it�s right there.� And so I watched it, because I couldn�t not watch a much-hyped Korean thriller that was so easily available to me, and because the descriptions for this one made it sound fantastic and even if it was abridged, how bad could it be?
First, I want to talk about what I liked about the movie, and then I�ll talk about how the bowdlerization hurt it. The Yellow Sea depicts the catastrophic misadventures of an ethnic Korean citizen of China (Joseonjok, is what they�re called in Korean) who procured an expensive visa of dubious legality for his wife to work in South Korea, and two years later he�s lost contact with her. He owes sixty thousand yuan (I have no idea how much that�s worth; yes I do, some website tells me it�s worth 9,449 US dollars and eleven cents; thank you, internet) to these two thugs, who harass him at every turn. Our protagonist, Kim Ga-num (played by Ha Jung-woo) is in a pretty sorry state; his income as a cab driver clearly isn�t enough to pay off the thugs, and he blows much of it on mahjong anyway. Ga-num is also goaded by the gangsters and even his own mother into assuming that the reason he�s lost contact with his wife is because she�s taken up with some other man in Korea and abandoned him and their young daughter.
At this point I should say that, although I have never before seen a cinematic representation of China�s Yanbian, the �Korean Autonomous Prefecture� within Jilin Province, Na expertly depicts its capital city of Yanji with a few quick, bleak strokes as one of those nightmarish cities (perhaps largely of my imagination) in which development is booming and the First World is shooting up amidst the decayed remnants of the Third World (I know these terms are no longer �PC,� but I wasn�t sure how to phrase this with the terms �developing� and �developed,� and anyway, those terms are problematic in their own right).
Well, anyway, the thugs find a way for Ga-num to make the money to pay them back. They bring him to a prominent Joseonjok gangster name of Myung-ga (Kim Yun-seok, who played opposite Ha Jung-woo in Na�s first film, 2008�s The Chaser). Myung-ga has an assignment for Ga-num: travel to South Korea and murder someone for him. If Ga-num does this, Myung-ga will pay him 60,000 yuan, thusly freeing him from his debts.
So there�s our premise. Once Ga-num arrives in Korea, surprise surprise, it turns into a shitstorm of epic proportions, because local Korean gangsters are already trying to kill his target, and so it ends up with Ga-num vs. the Korean mafia vs. the Joseonjok mafia vs. the South Korean police force, which is at its typical, incompetent best in this film. And with all this going on, Ga-num also isn�t going to squander the opportunity to try to find his wife. It�s this kind of intricate thriller plotting that distinguishes Na and his countrymen like Park Chan-wook and Kim Ji-woon and it definitely shines through in this movie, despite the best efforts of the Fox Lorber people to suppress it, which brings me back to that topic.
First off, I must clarify again, as I did in my previous post on The Yellow Sea, that I have not seen the unabridged Korean release of the film, or the director�s cut which has been released in other markets. Furthermore, I speak not a word of Korean (aside from oh-ma, which seems to mean mother, although I don�t know how to Romanize it), and so I can�t testify to what extent the subtitles are deliberately misleading and intended to make the movie seem less bleak, as some have alleged. But bearing all of this in mind, there were definitely scenes in the movie where I could tell that portions had been excised by the censor�s scalpel. This censorship of violent scenes happens on numerous occasions, but I think a description of three of them will suffice to illustrate my point here.
The first scene in question is the one in which Ga-num attempts to kill his target, only to find that there are already two guys on the scene doing the same thing. Now, Ga-num could just sit idly by and let them do his dirty work for him, but Myung-ga insisted that Ga-num bring back the target�s thumb as proof that he�d done the deed, so Ga-num is going to need to get access to the body. As this scene unfolded, my first impression was that it was just the victim of too much shaky-cam and choppy editing (see: every fight scene that Christopher Nolan has ever tried to �choreograph�). The camera bounces and cuts all over the place, showing us bits of the very bloody fight, but always seeming to cut away when it threatened to get too gruesome. It was only when the fight was over, and everyone was dead except Ga-num, that I realized the fight had been censored. Because when Ga-num goes to cut off the dead man�s thumb, which takes him a fair amount of hacking, the camera keeps cutting away, and I thought to myself, �Wait a minute: this is a Korean movie. There�s no fucking way that a Korean director would shy away from that sort of thing (think of the severing of the Achilles� tendons in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeanceor the partial tearing off of a man�s jaw in I Saw the Devil. Eliding graphic violence just isn�t the Korean way.) This scene must have been censored by its distributers.
But again, why? I mean, who�s the target demographic for this movie in the United States? Korean movie fans! The same people who saw Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and I Saw the Devil and who clearly weren�t so traumatized by those films that they�re not seeking out more.
Let�s move onto another scene. Myung-ga, the Joseonjok gangster from Yanji, is being attacked in his room by three Korean mobsters with knives and what are either axes or meat cleavers (for whatever reason, none of the gangsters in this movie had guns). And here there was no subtlety to the censorship. The mobsters approach the door, force their entrance, and close it behind them and then we hear the sounds of a fight inside. Then we cut to the aftermath of the fight, just as Myung-ga is splitting a man�s head open with his own hatchet. Now, there are only two reasons to elide what had the potential to be a very exciting fight scene: A. You don�t actually have the money to stage the fight scene, and so it�s easier to just imply that a fight scene has happened. Now, maybe that�s what you do if you�re making some incredibly cheap piece of shit for the Sci-Fi Channel (I�m sorry, Syfy [sic] Channel), but this is a big budget production. The Yellow Sea topped the Korean box office during its Christmas weekend release (I don�t know if Christmas is a big release date in Korea, but still, the point is that it was a big movie). So it can�t be A.
Which leads us to: B. You don�t think your audience can handle the violence on display, and so you�ve decided to edit it out of the film. But again, why would you do this? This is a Korean thriller! People come to it expecting insane levels of graphic violence! All you accomplish by censoring it is to deflate it. You�re not making it more palatable for people who can�t handle movie violence, because they were never going to see this movie anyway. The people who want to see this movie are the people who can handle this level of violence. So you�re just fucking around with your audience. And it must be said that this type of elision�combatants approach, the camera cuts away, we hear the sound of fighting, and then we return to the scene just as the fight is over�is repeated on numerous occasions throughout the film and appears to be the censorship method of choice for the people at Fox Lorber.
The final example of Bowdlerization is perhaps the most egregious; it is of the sort that I imagine the original Thomas Bowdler would have found it necessary to inflict on Hamlet, a Hamlet so thoroughly sanitized that nobody�s murdered anyone�s brother and married his widow, and nobody�s considering murdering his uncle, and so Hamlet is just stomping around the stage, pissed off for no reason, probably listening to Linkin Park on his iPod that his Uncle Claudius bought him to try to �win him over,� because he knows that Hamlet�s having a �hard time.� In The Yellow Sea, it happens like this: near the end of the film, Ga-num�s car is struck by the car of two Korean mobsters (whether or not they knew who they were striking I could not discern; this was one of several scenes where the viewer couldn�t avoid asking, �Wait, who the hell are those guys?� So evidently it was more than just violence that got elided. Aspects of the plot were also obscured). The mobsters take the unconscious Ga-num and load him into the back of their car, with the intention of taking him to the docks and killing him. Again, I couldn�t tell if they were doing this because they had hit some random guy and wanted to get rid of him, or if they knew who Ga-num was and were carrying out an assignment. I kind of think it was the former.
Well, Ga-num regains consciousness and he hears the guys discussing their plans to murder him, and so he takes out his trusty knife (everybody in this movie is armed at all times with some sort of pointy implement) and when they open the trunk, he leaps out at them and a fight ensues. We do not see the fight. The camera once again cuts away to some other scene, and when we return to Ga-num, we find that one of his assailants is dead, the other is wielding a shovel (which came from somewhere) and is pleading for his life, and Ga-num has sustained a serious abdominal wound. The fight resolves itself with the guy with the shovel tripping and falling to his death (so that was easy), and Ga-num kidnaps an old fisherman and directs him to take him back to China via his fishing boat. While on the boat, Ga-num bleeds to death, dying of the abdominal wound which we were not allowed to see him sustain and which we can only surmise was inflicted on him by his two captors rather than in some previous fight (because Ga-num, Myung-ga, and the head of the Korean mafia all sustain numerous injuries throughout this film that should have been, at the very last, incapacitating, and probably fatal. I mean, seriously, if someone drives a knife into your back, I�m pretty sure you can�t move afterwards. But apparently it�s like the old �gunshot wound in the shoulder� routine, and you briefly grimace and press your hand to the wound, but then you�re fine and you just carry on with your business.)
So, just to reiterate here, Ga-num, the hero of this film, fucking dies from a wound that was apparently inflicted off-screen. You�d think that that wound would be pretty fucking important to the plot, wouldn�t you? And yet the people at Fox Lorber, as far as I can tell, didn�t think you could handle all that violence (or maybe, even worse, they just thought the movie was too long, so they cut it left and right), and so they cut out a profoundly important element of the plot, so important that it actually dictates the ending of the movie (God, forgive all these italics; I hope you, the dear reader, don�t think that you�ve stumbled into a J. D. Salinger book).
So did I enjoy the movie? Sure, well enough. But I can tell that I would have derived significantly more satisfaction from it had I been allowed to see the unabridged version of the film, as it was made by Na Hong-jin, before Philistine business types at Fox Lorber got their hands on it and mutilated it. The only redeeming aspect of this whole fiasco that I can conceive of is the hope that everybody is so pissed off by the whole affair that such a bowdlerization�at least of a Korean film�isn�t allowed to happen again.
