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| Images courtesy of Radiance Films |
Radiance Films have been actively releasing numerous East
Asian titles with many, many Japanese films in boxed set trilogies or lenticular
limited editions replete with a collector’s booklet and an OBI spine akin to
Japanese laserdiscs or compact discs. What
they’re new to, however, are China with the long since sold out Nomad and
South Korea with Splendid Outing making both its worldwide blu-ray disc premiere
and the very first South Korean offering from the boutique label. Restored in 4K by the Korean Film Archive and
featuring plentiful extras including running audio commentaries, a visual essay
on female protagonists in contemporary Korean cinema, reversible sleeve art and
a collectible booklet, the film represents the boutique label’s foray into what
will hopefully become a fruitful licensing agreement with the Korean Film Archive
in the coming days.
Directed by actor-director Kim Soo-yong late in his life
amid an already prolific career spanning back decades (starting in 1958 and
ending in 2000 having directed 109 films) and starring Yoon Jeong-Hee of Lee
Chang-dong’s Poetry, Splendid Outing is an uncategorizable
increasingly nightmarish horror film functioning as sly political allegory
sneaking past dictatorial censors. Involving
a kind of Woman in the Dunes fish out of water displacement and freefall
of an accomplished city person thrust against their will into rural life with
no seeming escape and just a hint of the kind of violent darkness you’d see in
Kim Ki-duk’s Bad Guy, the film is the work of a master well into his
tenure in a film that forecasts the eventual emergence of Korean cinema on the
world stage.
In one of many pairings with the director, Yoon Jeong-Hee
plays Gong Do-hee, a single Seoul-based decorated glittering and fearsome corporate
chairwoman with many underlings from both genders bowing reverently at her
feet. Following her husband’s After a
fleeting nightmare involving her dead twin sister (doppelganger?), Gong Do-hee takes
an impromptu drive out to the seaside seeking a most Splendid Outing. Trying to board a ferry boat, however, her
car is besieged by fishermen who seemingly drive her out of her vehicle tearing
at her clothing and chase her down a dock to toss a red net on her and knock
her unconscious. When she comes to, she
finds herself in a waking nightmare stranded on an island with a boorish and
violent fisherman named Yong Dal-ho (Lee Dae-keun) who insists she is his runaway
wife Kim Myung-ja and forcibly holds her captive.
To say more past this point would give away the film’s
surrealistic twists and turns as the lines between reality and dream are
blurred in a proto-Lynchian fashion with the kind of madcap hallucinatory mania
you saw in Seijun Suzuki’s A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (also released
by Radiance). A terrifying and steadily
claustrophobic whirlwind that spoke out against the coercion of false confessions
committed by the regime in the time, Splendid Outing is at once pointed
and nebulous as it drifts without much of a safety net in and out of the waking
and sleeping states. With dynamic, fluid
widescreen cinematography by Painted Fire cameraman Jung Il-Sung and an
arrestingly terrifying near atonal score by Kang Seok-hui, watching and hearing
Splendid Outing unfold takes on an increasingly menacing and gradually
maddening quality, particular in the third act which I don’t dare spoil. While an ensemble piece, the film basically
boils down to Yoon Jeong-hee playing off of the dangerous masculinity of Lee Dae-Keun
who makes the adversarial fisherman intimidating but strangely attractive to
our otherwise lonely protagonist. Mostly
though it tracks Yoon Jeong-hee’s transformation from well-groomed chairwoman
to the unkempt and grizzled fisherman’s wife.
Truly the tale of ‘a woman in trouble’ that would make even
David Lynch or Luis Buñuel recoil in their seats, Splendid Outing is
generally regarded as one of director Kim Soo-yong’s most striking and acerbic
efforts to date, a maelstrom of nightmare logic dreaming about the then-horrors
of living in 1970s South Korea.
Amazingly left untouched by the censors despite challenging
authoritarianism and patriarchy, the film is a sly precursor to the boldness of
2000s South Korean cinema pointing towards Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk and later
Bong Joon-ho. Scary and more than a
little snarky in its sly social satire going onscreen, Splendid Outing feels
even more relevant now in our own uncertain sociopolitical climate and terrifyingly
suggests accomplishment, stature and titles can mean little or nothing to one’s
own agency or self-preservation, especially if you’re a woman ruling in a
dog-eat-dog man’s world.
--Andrew Kotwicki
