Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today: From Seoul To Varanasi (2011)

Cast: Nigel D’Sa, Cassandra Holmes, Nollaig Walsh
Director: Kyu-hwan Jeon
Country: South Korea | India
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following article and review is a a part of Rowena Santos Aquino’s coverage of the Korean film series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today”. Additional entries can be found here.

An ongoing affair between a publisher and one of his writers is but the start of a series of events and relationships that will move the narrative from the local to the regional and international in Jeon Kyu-hwan’s From Seoul To Varanasi. It is a film that presents a diegetic world eventually connected to and partially set in the bigger historical world, in a way still infrequently unseen in contemporary Korean cinema. It also presents characters of different ethnicities, an equally contrasting element in relation to a still largely monocultural and monolingual Korean cinema—though several films in the past couple of years have dealt with migrant labour and interracial romances, such as Bandhobi (2009, Sin Dong-il). What makes From Seoul To Varanasi different from Bandhobi is that it does not necessarily make of migrant labour and interracial romance its calling and/or principal preoccupation, even as it addresses these issues. In this regard, From Seoul To Varanasi is closer in geographical trajectory and thematic malaise to Jeon Soo-il’s Himalaya: Where The Wind Dwells (2008), which moves from Seoul to the mountain village of Jharkot, Nepal. But while Himalaya traces the journey that sees Choi Min-sik’s character increasingly removed from the bustle of the city and social ties, Varanasi finds its troupe of characters connected to an ever larger complex web of social ties that move towards the political.

It is a film that presents a diegetic world eventually connected to and partially set in the bigger historical world, in a way still infrequently unseen in contemporary Korean cinema.

An enticing premise, surely, but Varanasi matches this expectation only to a degree.

While Yeong-woo (Yoon Dong-hwan) carries on his affair with Su-yeon (Shin Ye-an), through a random set of acquaintances and occurrences, Yeong-woo’s wife Ji-yeong (Choi Won-jeong) makes contact with and grows emotionally close to a Lebanese Canadian, Kerim (Nollaig Walsh), a waiter in a restaurant. To flesh out Yeong-woo and Ji-yeong’s parallel amorous adventures, Jeon moves from graphic sex scenes between Yeong-woo and Su-yeon and a series of events (a minor car accident right in front of his workplace, his epileptic fit that sends him to the hospital and she being declared a guardian due to his foreigner status) that seem to fight for Ji-yeong and Kerim to get to know each other. These simultaneous plots come to overlap significantly on Ji-yeong’s birthday. To make things more complicated—in non-linear fashion—a line of mystery subtly enters the picture that somehow connects Ji-yeong’s disappearance, Kerim’s deportation; Kerim’s friend Ali, who may or may not be associated with terrorist groups; the site of Varanasi, and bombings. If the narrative sounds rather wearisome, Jeon’s treatment makes it less so.

Varanasi has a nagging rawness to its advantage, as it follows the ultra banalities of a middle-class affair and a repressed housewife who befriends a foreigner. One watches these people go about their lives rather plainly, with all of their flaws exposed to each other and to the spectator, or hidden from others while in full view for the spectator. The film’s detached tone towards its characters makes them all the more pathetic and doomed. If the graphic sex scenes between Yeong-woo and Su-yeon are initially startling, each subsequent instance of them becomes increasingly mechanical and unfeeling. And mechanical and unfeeling also describe Yeong-woo and Su-yeon. In simplistic contrast is the friendship between Ji-yeong and Kerim, although admittedly their relationship constitutes a strange, magnetic vulnerability.

And the film’s energy is summed up best through the character of Kerim: unpretentious yet sure of himself; deceptively simple for his quietness and easy-going demeanour yet possibly hiding something.

In the end, the film is really about Ji-yeong and Kerim. In some sense we are talking about a tragic film, for Yeong-woo’s words of “She wouldn’t survive without me” regarding Ji-yeong, uttered no less than to his lover, sounds like a death knell in retrospect. And the film’s energy is summed up best through the character of Kerim: unpretentious yet sure of himself; deceptively simple for his quietness and easy-going demeanour yet possibly hiding something.

The only character made Other (and therefore superfluous) is Kerim’s Muslim acquaintance, Ali. Shots of Ali often punctuate a scene to add to the film’s overall sense of ambiguity, threat, uncertain relations, and unmoored sense of self, but the result is often more droll than anything else. Better is the film’s non-chronological structure in drawing out the existential fracture that pervades all of the characters and the drab, plain settings in which they live, move, and are irrevocably connected, like it or not.