Hawaii International Film Festival
Close-ups are rare in "Spring In My Hometown," a Korean
film being screened at the Hawaii International Film Festival.

‘Spring’ director
doesn’t manage to
reinvent form

This is the second in a series of reviews of the five feature films nominated for the Hawaii International Film Festival Maile Awards. One film will be reviewed daily through Friday. The winner, along with the Golden Maile for documentary films, will be announced at a HIFF awards ceremony Nov. 12. Tickets to the awards ceremony are $50. Call 528-HIFF for more information.

By Burl Burlingame
Star-Bulletin

IT takes any new art a while to find its language, and film has only been around for a century. The techniques of filmic storytelling are still evolving. But the grammar is pretty much there, the shorthand.

Which is why Kwang Mo Lee's attempts to reinvent the wheel with "Spring In My Hometown" are so frustrating. It's the same annoying urge you get when someone is stuttering in front of you -- there's a reflexive desire to finish their thoughts for them, because you get impatient, because the flow of language is diverted.

Lee is either being daringly obstinate or humbly inventive, and I'm sure any number of cineastes will drabble on endlessly about the "experience" of his film. For the rest of us, unconsciously fluent in the grammar laid down decades ago by Griffith, Chaplin, Hitchcock and the rest, Lee is just havering.

"Spring In My Hometown" takes place in the Korean countryside during the Korean War. Although the fighting is taking place elsewhere, times aren't easy. The Americans' easy cash and sexual urges are thoroughly disrupting the peaceful populace -- it's as if the Imperial Japanese occupation just a few years before never happened.

Neighbors fear and distrust one another -- when's the last time you heard someone snarl "You Commie rat!" in a movie? The seasons come and ago (the "spring" of the title is misleading) and eventually the war ends -- although the effects linger, apparently, for Lee, to this day.

HIFF
Beautifully composed landscapes fill "Spring In My
Hometown," one of the Hawaii International Film
Festival Golden Maile entries.

All of which should be prime dramatic juice. But Lee has elected to tell the entire tale in long shots. There are about three close-ups in the entire film, one of which is an image of two beetles. All images are beautifully composed, but they're all landscapes. The figures are tiny and indistinguishable.

The teen-age boys featured in the film have a fascination with spying and the apparatus of peeping Tom-ism, and prize binoculars above everything else, and the film's style directly reflects that distancing. This decision, however, short-circuits the audience's emotional investment. It's like watching life through a bus window; interesting, but disconnected, and it rolls away without making an impact.

Tech credits are adequate, although photography by Hyungkoo Kim is attractive. I wonder, though, if Korean kids actually said "Cool!" and "Awesome!" as translated by the subtitles.

Now showing

When: Repeats at 9:30 p.m. tomorrow
Where: Hawaii Theatre Center.
Neighbor islands: Showings are 5:30 p.m. Nov. 16 at Kauai Community College and 5:30 p.m. Nov. 19 at the Palace Theatre on the Big Island.