Peppermint candy

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Movie
German title Peppermint candy
Original title Bakha Satang ( 박하 사탕 )
Country of production South Korea
original language Korean
Publishing year 2000
length 130 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Lee Chang-dong
script Lee Chang-dong
production Myeong Gye-nam , Ueda Makoto
music Lee Jae-jin
camera Kim Hyeong-gu
cut Park Il-hyeon
occupation

Peppermint Candy (Original title: Bakha Satang ) is a South Korean feature film by Lee Chang-dong from 2000. In Germany, the film will be published for the first time in 2019 as an insert in the Mediabook for Burning (2018).

Plot and structure

The story begins at its end and works its way back to its origins in seven sequences, spanning a total of two decades. Little by little, the end of the story seen at the beginning of the film and the previous sections become clear.

The film begins in the spring of 1999 during a picnic by former classmates on a river bank on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of their first class reunion. An excited man in a suit disrupts the meeting. After the group recognizes their old school friend Yongho in him, Yongho climbs onto the nearby railway bridge. When he perceives an express train approaching him rapidly and threatening to hit him, he utters the desperate cry "I'm going back!"

With this he introduces the retrospective, which is laid out in several stages, and which at the end will explain who Yongho was and how he committed suicide on the bridge. Between the individual sequences, a section of a track with a train moving backwards appears. Just as the tracks connect everything linearly, the stations in Yongho's life are also causally linked and inevitably lead to his predetermined fate.

The course of the film initially takes us 3 days back. Yongho has been abandoned by his wife, has lost all of his assets on the stock market and has also owed a loan shark. With the last of his money he buys a revolver with the intention of putting an end to his life. Then he learns that his first and greatest love, Sunim, is lying on his death bed and that he wishes to see him one last time.

The next station leads to 1994. Yongho is unhappily married to Hongja, runs a small business and has a relationship with one of his employees. A chance meeting with a person from his past leads on to the next sequence after 1987. Yongho works as a police officer - and doesn’t even shy away from torture to extort confessions. The first signs of a crisis are noticeable between himself and his pregnant wife Hongja. One step back, in 1984, Yongho begins his police service and beats his first confession out of a suspect - which traumatizes him. Even a visit to his first great love cannot free him from this trauma. At this time he met Hongja.

Eventually the film reaches the moment that changed Yongho's life. 1980, during his military service, he negligently shot and killed a student on her way home. The end of the film takes the viewer to 1979 on the same river bank where Yongho's life is slated to end 20 years later. The same picnickers as at the beginning of the film - all 20 years younger - have their first meeting. Among them are Yongho and his great love Sunim. Yongho is a hopeful young man who dreams of one day becoming a photographer. The viewer already knows that things should turn out differently for him.

backgrounds

The protagonist lives through the events of recent Korean history, the path of South Korea to democracy . The key event in Yongho's life takes place against the backdrop of the Gwangju uprising in 1980, when demonstrating students and citizens were the victims of several days of massacre by the forces of the military government. During the 1980s, Yongho's character hardened under the influence of brutal police methods. Indeed, the 1980s in South Korea were shaped by General Chun Doo-hwan's regime , under which a kind of martial law was upheld. The constitutional reform of 1988 brought a political turnaround, which also went hand in hand with economic growth. During this time, Yongho built up an existence as an independent businessman, until 1997 when the great economic crash in East Asia bursts investment bubbles.

The non-chronological narrative and the theme of the predestination and inevitability of fate are reminiscent of other films from the same period on an international level ( Run Lola , Memento ).

Festivals

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Peppermint Candy . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF; test number: 192622 / V). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  2. ↑ Mystery drama "Burning" from October 11, 2019 also as a 4K Mediabook Edition. In: Bluray-Disc.de. June 6, 2019, accessed July 18, 2019 .