Review: Ghosts of War / aka, R-Point (Kong Su-chang, 2004)

Vietnam, 1972. Private Kim and Lieutenant Choi, a distinguished officer who was awarded the Choong Moo for service in defence of his country, are on R & R. They take up with some hookers in Nha Trang, but in the night Kim is murdered. Choi finds and executes the assassin, a girl, point blank. Back at camp, Choi is brought before Lieutenant Colonel Han who agrees to forget the incident if he leads a platoon into R-Point—a rural area, now designated hostile—to find missing soldiers, presumed K.I.A. Choi acquiesces. In R-Point, the platoon encounter their first insurgent: a peasant, not unlike the girl at Nha Trang, who seems to be fighting all alone in the forest. After a brief firefight, they leave her in a pillbox, ostensibly to rot, but not long after the girl reappears to them again in the night …

Review

Opening with harrowing testimony from the survivor of an ambush attack which claimed the lives of his colleagues, then segueing across the film’s new title-card into a scene of our hero, Lieutenant Choi, effectively committing career suicide in a brothel, R-Point, or Ghosts of War (for UK distributor Palisades Tartan has seen fit to rebrand), finds a deliberate balance early on between light and dark, empathy and wickedness, virtue and evil. The film’s broad range of characters provide familiar variations on these themes; at some point, all of the soldiers caught in R-Point admit to living a life of deceit in which they have wronged their loved ones, or a cruel and violent life determined largely by their honed indifference to the “enemy.” It’s some time before we learn who is truly guilty (or, to borrow pre-war language used at the time to describe the French cause in Indochina, “impure”), and who is not, but the maxim “Those who have blood on their hands will not return,” conveyed to the soldiers in the form of an ancestral warning that seems to pervert Confucian philosophy, seems relevant to all. The film, apparently a down and dirty cautionary tale in the tropical hell of Vietnam, charts the repercussions that result from these many and various indiscretions, as one by one the hapless soldiers are targeted by a host of judgmental apparitions and one by one they each take their chances.

Thematically, though, Ghosts of War is more ambitious than this. For one, director Kong Su-chang doesn’t engage with the war directly. His film instead assumes audience foreknowledge of North and South Korean participation in Vietnam and perhaps too, though less expected, the cumulative benefits to the South of this participation (in the form of loans, subsidies and preferential trade arrangements with the U.S.). The specifics aren’t of importance in the film, but the historical arrangement itself, forged between President Park Chung-hee and the Johnson and Nixon administrations respectively, is far from irrelevant. According to Time (1999), the largest single source of foreign exchange for Korea in this period came in the form of war-induced revenues (U.S. defence-related expenditures, U.S. government grants, exports and production for U.S. consumption); the success of Korea’s economic development program therefore hangs heavy over proceedings. To the film’s credit, the viewer is always aware of the likely consequences of this participation, and as the many allusions to separated families, divided armies, and struggles for reunification particularly make clear, the infusion of foreign capital into the South at such a dramatic rate could only exacerbate the country’s own relations with the North. To those already primed for an anti-Vietnam War statement then, or for any critique of Korea’s support for American military intervention (Iraq included), the film will at least play well. Each soldier awaits to be discharged and shipped back to Korea after the mission, although in what condition they expect to find their country under the incipient authoritarian leadership of its dictator remains unclear (it is appropriate that Su-chang too sets his film in the year 1972). In this respect, Korea’s very participation in the war, which the film sees negatively, seems to underlie the economic recovery of the specific period—Su-chang’s implied message being that Korea, like the soldiers in his film, must in some way acknowledge its own guilt.

The director is also inspired (as one may expect for a film that places so much emphasis on borders and territory) by the merging of old cultures. By setting the action on an isolated island which we’re led to believe was of some strategic importance to colonialists, Ghosts of War evokes the passing of several distinct phases in Vietnamese history: the nation’s split from imperial China in the 10th century, its colonisation by the French in the late 19th, its struggle for autonomy and self-rule during the French-Indochinese War, and the American Vietnam war, viewed itself to be a lost cause, and hence “passing,” even in 1972. The film is most effective when tinkering with these cultural stresses and inventing massacres. Kim Byung-chul’s Cho, an educated mortician’s son, tells the group as he reads from a stone marker that the Chinese executed hundreds of Vietnamese in the area, then dumped them in a lake, terrestrialised it, and erected a Buddhist temple to bring harmony to the site; later in the film a harmless interloper relates another story, this time an act of near-genocide committed by an unknown enemy. The latter tale is relayed by an American marine, the victims he describes are French colonialists; indeed the American himself guards a nasty secret, prohibiting Choi’s men from entering the second floor of their headquarters and snooping around the rooms where a lot of his platoon’s hardware is stored. So, while there is an inevitable loss of depth in any Vietnam film that neglects to touch on the Vietnamese experience directly (the identity of the ghost that haunts Choi so persistently is up for debate—is she Viet Cong, is she even Vietnamese—frustrating assertions that Su-chang has feminised the native experience at all), it becomes plain that Ghosts of War is happier gesturing towards these cultural dichotomies. We quickly build an impression, then, of R-Point as some kind of slavish purgatory.

This is the first feature length film from Kong Su-chang, who cut his teeth co-writing the Vietnam movie White Badge (Jeong Ji-yeong, 1992), If It Snows On Christmas (Jang Dong-hong, 1998), the Korean adaptation The Ring Virus (Kim Dong-bin, 1999) and the altogether silly, Tell Me Something (Chang Yoon-hyun, 1999), the third highest grossing domestic film of that year no less. Since Ghosts of War was clearly hampered by time and budgetary constraints, the director makes careful use of an intimidating landscape (location shooting exclusively in Kampuchea, Southern Cambodia) and, admirably, is quite comfortable staging a locked off dialogue scene in an ordinarily visually banal field of reeds. After a promising start the film catches in a familiar groove, but Su-chang occasionally produces the unexpected: a reconnaissance mission in which all but one of the platoon vanish in the undergrowth, never to resurface (the scene elegantly held in long take from the remaining soldier’s vantage); or a plantation filling with white headstones as Choi, the man caught in the middle, grasps finally the implications of his mission. There are, however, some wrong notes on the way. The infamous Bokor Palace is an incredible four-storey building from rooftop to entrance, its scorched outer walls red with lichen, the entire complex in reality decimated throughout by mortar shells, by gunfire, by looters of the Khmer Rouge, yet in accordance with Su-chang’s preferences, and needless to say with the eye of his cinematographer Seok Hyeong-jing, the palace is only ever substantially used at night. The “atmospheric” reveal early in the film is extravagant waste (the site cannot be seen for mist), and from then on Bokor barely appears in full light again. It is as if they seem determined not to use Bokor’s imposing authority at all. In another example, Su-chang’s camera at times tries to convey a spiritual presence. Shifting visual register whenever the ghostly apparition appears, these first-person shots are hokey adornments to the powerful moments of portentousness found in subtle transitions (the camera rising from the reeds to a solitary light above) or an actor’s expression.

On this note, the performances are generally strong. Alone in Love (Han Ji-seung, 2006) star Kam Woo-sung underplays the charismatic Choi, a fearless and competitive fighter who is now just quietly awaiting the inevitable return of the girl he killed lawlessly in Nha Trang, and hence his doom. Son Byung-ho succeeds in creating great menace as Jin Chang-rok, the largely dispassionate, growling, frowning sergeant who has the potential for turning the place into a bristling death camp. As their temperamental young charges (split between a grudging respect for Jin and enthusiasm for Choi), the aforementioned Kim Byung-chul as the nebbish Cho Byung-hoon, Oh Tae-kyung as sixteen year-old Jang Young-soo and Park Won-sang as the older, surly, good-natured Mah (aka, Sergeant “Cook”) supply rounded and often sensitive performances, enough to offer a glimpse that is into their pre-war lifestyles before blood starts dropping out of the sky.

Indeed, from that messy point on, the film begins to stray. If Su-chang had allowed his characters’ increasingly suicidal behaviour to stem from the confusion and suffering caused by war—if Choi, Cho and Jin had inched closer to the “darker side” of humanity as it is described in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979, U.S.A.) by undergoing a natural process of initiation—his film might have had more power. As it stands, though, Ghosts of War tucks its tail and imagines a supernatural curse spiral endemic to the island. An unnecessary plot-point—initiated by the arrival of some American squaddies who are cryptically just checking in to see that the lights are still on—the idea that an evil spirit, like a curse, is disseminated through people, while obviously supported by the mythologies of Asian cultures, feels like a vain gesture, a conceit which this budget production sadly cannot do justice. It was probably, therefore, a mistake to introduce across the board ghost story conventions into, what might ordinarily pass for, an intense psychological drama—the film suffers for this. But as a useful primer on why Korean horror of the early 00s, and more broadly East Asian ghost stories, are often so complex and engaging (its influence is felt as far afield from cinema as Monolith Production’s F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon videogame), Ghosts of War is pretty much required viewing, and ranks as one of the smartest Korean thrillers of 2004.

Region 2 DVD Review

No more features beyond what is available in Tartan’s own Asia Extreme release (in fact, the opposite, as Justin Bowyer’s sleeve notes appear now to have gone). The rebranding itself is no problem, but some godawful package design by Tartan (the original still of Bokor is excised, replaced with something more palatable to Western eyes) will confuse any viewer on the look out now for a wooden barn (there really is little excuse, and fans will notice). Otherwise, an acceptable not expert transfer, Dolby Digital 5.1, D.T.S. (which pays dividends in some outstanding scenes), comprehensible subtitles, the usual prerequisites are here.

The film carries a commentary with director Kong, producer Choi Kang-hyuk, and location supervisor Kim Wan-shik. The two anecdotal featurettes, “1972 Vietnam” and “Special Effects” are quite self-effacing, but the key elements of principal photography and post can be found in “Mission R-Point” and “Broken Radio,” the latter an amusing overview of the Foley artist’s responsibilities at work, twinned with a glimpse of the final scene in various stages of the mix: pre-effects, pre-score, etc. The feature commentary is surprisingly candid. You suspect the director would have been satisfied if audiences responded to his film as allegory, but on the evidence here he seems content with the more literal readings which members of the crew seem to have returned to him. One interesting aside early on about the lighting in a key scene gives some genuine insight into the first-time director’s working partnership with his cinematographer (a repeat of this in the Hollywood system would have been downright inexcusable and the D.P. fired). Any commentary in which the speaker drops the line, “and the moths were really obnoxious,” and the director sneers at his own product placement, is sweet in my book.