Choi Won-kyun and his ox in the South Korean documentary “Old Partner,” the first feature directed by Lee Chung-ryoul. Shcalo Media Group
Published: December 30, 2009
By A. O. SCOTT
Animals are hardly rare on film these days, but most are bred in digital laboratories and given voice and charisma by movie stars. The inscrutable dignity of actual beasts is less often captured and may even seem strange when encountered in a documentary like “Old Partner,” the first feature directed by Lee Chung-ryoul.
To call an ancient, slow-moving, nameless ox the hero of the film would be a slight distortion, since the only actions he performs are the ones that have defined his daily existence for more than 30 years. He ruminates. He pulls a plow and occasionally a cart, moving with exquisite slowness as the world goes rushing by. His body is bony and massive, and his face is a perpetual enigma, expressing steadfastness, resignation or, more likely, a state of bovine consciousness beyond the ken of humans.
Not that this ox, thought to be the oldest in South Korea, is a stranger to people. On the contrary, he is the longtime companion of an elderly farming couple, Choi Won-kyun and Lee Sam-soon. Older than most of their nine children, the ox has shared their daily round of work and rest, a utilitarian arrangement that turns out to be surprisingly complicated. In his quiet, unassuming way, the animal sits at the apex of a love triangle, serving Mr. Choi as a helpmate and confidant and representing, to Ms. Lee, a rival for her husband’s devotion.
Mr. Choi, frail and partially deaf, one of his legs withered by a long-ago accident, is cantankerous and impatient with his wife and tenderly solicitous of his beast of burden. He prepares special fodder, and keeps his fields pesticide-free. When, late in the film, he reluctantly agrees to sell the ox at an agricultural fair, he is shocked at the low offers. It is also possible that he has set his asking price high enough to make a sale unlikely.
Ms. Lee, meanwhile, who has no grudge against the ox (though she seems to prefer a younger heifer), peppers her husband with complaints that sound both sincere and habitual. She works hard, she’s tired and she has wasted her life on the wrong man. Mr. Choi tunes her out, but he is quick to respond whenever the ox seems to need something.
Still, the condition these three share can be described only as happiness, though it is not the kind of material comfort often associated with that word. Rather, like the French farmers in Raymond Depardon’s documentaries on rural life or the shepherds in the recent Kazakh film “Tulpan,” they represent an old and difficult way of life that seems to be fading before our eyes. The elderly couple’s relationship with the animal who has shared their lives may seem odd, charming and a bit absurd, but the deep and poignant insight of Mr. Lee’s film is that such complicated interspecies bonds are perfectly natural.
Old Partner
Written, directed and edited by Lee Chung-ryoul; director of photography, Ji Jae-woo; music by Heo Hoon and Min Soyun; produced by Goh Young-jae; released by Shcalo Media Group. In Korean, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. This film is not rated.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment