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Spring In My Hometown Medusa
SUNG MIN and Chang Hee, two young boys, are best friends in a remote village in Korea during the Korean war. They spend their free time after school spying on an abandoned mill where US soldiers have regular sexual encounters with local prostitutes. Sung Min's family is relatively well off: his father finds work at the US base, his sister Young Sook is dating a US officer and the rest of the family open a dye business for GI uniforms. Chang Hee's family is less fortunate. With his father being dragged off by North Korean soldiers they fall into poverty and are forced to live off Sung Min's family. Everything turns from bad to worse when the two boys accidentally witness Chang Hee's mother having sex with a GI in the old mill. The timespan of the film is two years (1952-1953) and director Kwangmo Lee manages to make it feel that long watching it! The slow pace is not helped by the predominantly still camera work and long shots. In some situations it's even difficult to visually distinguish who is interacting with whom. All of this distances the viewer who must work at detecting the subtle hints which push the plot along. Political tensions in particular are not clearly conveyed. You are simply fed a few lines, as though out of a history book, about what happened on that particular day. And if you are no expert in the Korean war you are doomed to lose track of what is going on fairly quickly. What could have been an interesting film about the hardship of everyday rural life during those times ends up being an unemotional, overlong and simply unaccessible field-study.
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