Burning Barns/ Greenhouses/ Cigarettes/ People

        The things that stood out most to me when watching the film were the additions to the narrative made in adaptation. I felt Chang-Dong Lee stayed rather faithful to the original plot beats while adding his own, some of which added layers to the plot and others that would occasionally strike me as odd.

        The aspect of the new plot which stuck out most to me was Jong-su's relationship with his father, as whenever it cut back to that I was left puzzled at its inclusion. From my understanding, Jong-su's father had a lot in common with the famously obstinate and oddly violent father that could be found in the William Faulkner story "Barn Burning". The movie further cemented that thought in the various moments in which it went out of its way to mention Faulkner's writing. I believe this change was made so as to flesh out the restlessness that is presented by the protagonist of both the Murakami short story and film. Both forms of the story gesture at the human desire for destruction, with both protagonists being taken in by the vision of the wealthy stranger's habit for burning down small buildings. The director offered a glimpse into the desire and anger behind the quiet man and then took that desire for destruction and the mystery at the heart of the plot to its inevitable end by having Jong-su murder Ben.

    During the downtime of the movie, which it had a lot of, I often wondered about why the director changed the plot from burning down barns to burning down greenhouses, as greenhouses are far less innocuous than an old shed that no one uses. One way of looking at it is thinking of greenhouses as inarguably good and helpful, since they make food and flowers, and thus the desire to destroy one is the desire for destruction of the good in the world, rather than just the unremarkable. It also could just be argued that greenhouses are more common in Korea, I simply don't know.

     A change that the film made was that the character Ben was often shown amongst high society, whether it be his house or among his friends in a bar, which implies his possible destructive tendencies are not only accepted by the rich in Korea, but that he is not the only one with such inclinations. If so, the problems presented in the story are not personal, but rather indicative of a societal imbalance of power. Whether it is cigarettes, clothes, buildings or people, the characters in this film have a burning desire within them placed there by the unjust society in which they live.

  Side thoughts: 

• I think it's a bad sign when you go into a movie based on a ten page story and see that it is two and a half hours long, but I also am not an internationally acclaimed Korean director, so what do I know.
• They managed to add an awkward sex scene to one of the few Murakami stories without an awkward sex scene. The man would be proud.

 -Luke Ptak