What makes a person commit suicide – is it bad genes, bad luck or a bad attitude? Peppermint Candy doesn’t answer the question but it has a good hard look at it. One man, an extreme case when we meet him, angry, disoriented, drugged-up maybe, crashing a 20-year school reunion in the town where he grew up. The other members of the group try to calm him down but this one’s not for placating and, after disruping the party with his aggressive manner, Kim Yong-ho has soon climbed onto the elevated railway line nearby. And soon after that he’s dead, having disappeared under the front of an oncoming locomotive while screaming “I’m going back!”
And that’s what Lee Chang-dong’s remarkable 1999 film does, goes backwards through the life of this man, Kim. Back first of all three days, to Kim buying a gun. Back further, to 1994, when he angrily discovers his wife (Kim Yeo-jin) having an affair with her driving instructor, never mind that he, a reasonaby successful businessman, is also having an affair with his PA. Back to 1987, when he was a cop, a beacon of brutality in a force that prides itself on the success it achieves through torture. Back, back, back, eventually to a picnic in 1979, when Kim is about 19 and meeting Yun Sun-im (Moon So-ri), the pretty girl who will be the love of his life but who will slip through his fingers.
Through it all peppermint candy, the equivalent of Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, a meme acting as a portal onto another time, a thread through one man’s history, offered by Kim to Sun-im in a hospital bed near the beginning of the film (ie the end of Kim’s life) and from her to him at the end of the film (ie the beginning of Kim’s story). Ah haa, we go as she, as a slip of a girl, offers it to him. And we understand a little more.
Sympathy is in short supply for Kim, who is an asshole. But he’s our asshole and by introducing him as the victim who goes under a train as the film starts, Lee knows we will identify with him. And he exploits that identification ruthlessly, showing us, as Kim’s life plays out in reverse, the awfulness of the man in various stages of his younger life.
François Ozon’s great “life in reverse” movie, 5X2, which came five years after Peppermint Candy, also relies on the gift that this form delivers. It turns the viewer into a detective trying to work out what went wrong, and loads even the simplest action with the weight of known consequences. Nothing is just an event, it has the potential to be a clue and a significant marker in a life.
It’s the sympathy element that differentiates Peppermint Candy from 5X2 – should we like this unlikeable guy? Lee eventually answers the question by tying Kim into recent South Korean history and the military dictatorship that took over the country after a coup d’état in 1980. Here be spoilers.
Thoughout Lee shoots dispassionately, allowing the story seemingly to unfold without much of a steer from himself or his cameraman Kim Hyung-ku – flat, documentary-style lighting, a restricted colour palette, a restricted range of types of shot (reaction shots are limited, for instance, as are close-ups). Observation is the idea.
It’s a gift of a role for an actor of about 30, which Sol Kyung-gu was when he took it. Playing a violent man aged about 40 and then regressing back through his life to being a teenager, Sol’s performance keeps us guessing about this damaged character’s past, as he de-ages convincingly, presenting a less ingrained version of the same character as the film cycles back in time. Granted, Sol is not quite getting away with being a teenager, but that’s less a case of acting than skin texture, and there’s not much, in the pre-computer-ageing era, that can be done about that.
The reverse-chronology is more than a gimmick, it’s the source of the film’s power, a drama whose central driver – what made this guy like he is? – is left hanging in the air for the longest time, giving a psychoanalytical study the force of a thriller.
Peppermint Candy – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
