Ever since ‘the death of the author’ theory, people have basically stopped treating the original meanings as supreme. Meanings are now created fresh and new, every time a book opens its first page, a piece of music starts playing, and a film begins on screen.
The possible worlds theory is already riding on AI, just as it predicted. Stories are becoming plots now, without a final version.
These are only a few of the latest trends, and some of them have already been around for decades. These days, literature gives readers the liberty to choose their meaning. And so does the movie. People always called it the grand illusion—lovingly, for a reason.
People always needed to connect to every story there ever was, and translate them into their own lives. And all this was remembered by me once again—as I began to write this review of the Korean film ‘The Magician’ (2015).
The Gender Ethos of Joseon
Every nook and corner of the landscape where the movie unfolds has a cobweb of gender politics. A Korean king loses a war to China and has to send off his daughter as a tributary offering to the Qing dynasty.
He chose a fake princess. On her way to China, she sneaked out from her caravan to meet the sensation of the town—Hwan-hee, a magician. He is the crush of every girl in this small border town of Euiju, with his two lethal charms—his looks and his magic.
The flashbacks of his brutal backstory shows him committing his first murder in childhood—to escape a Chinese illusionist.
When he meets the princess, he thinks she’s a runaway slave. One day, he tells her bluntly that he should have the princess killed. He keeps explaining his reasons without stopping:
- All the treasures her bridal caravan is holding can feed the whole city,
- Assassins are as cheap as 50 silver coins amidst a famine yet to arrive in this town,
- And it is definitely more honorable for her to die, than to get abandoned later by her future Chinese prince-husband. That prince doesn’t even speak her language, and people will call her a prostitute if she returns to Joseon.
During moments like this, the runaway princess does find her own voice. Though he doesn’t recognise her and this time, mistakes her as a lady-in-waiting.
The story also starts with Hwan’s blind sister, Bo-eum, murdering a girl ruthlessly. She was put to death for the crime of loving him—which she deemed ‘poisonous’.
Bo-eum: An Unborn Writer
It becomes evident quite early that Bo-eum is more than a blind woman. She sees without eyesight and knows how to get her way in the world.
Professionally, she is a fortune teller. She entertains her guests by reading their palms. In one scene, she tells a wealthy client, ‘Wood burns to make the fire rise. You have a girl who has “wood” in her name waiting for you.’
This was an expression of the gender ethos in Joseon. All these words were coded. The wood and the fire alluded to the act of a man and a woman having sex.
Bo-eum knew her way around words. Perhaps this was a womanly talent. If women could have been afforded any merits in the Confucian Joseon at all, it was this.
After the Joseon King Sejong created the Hangul script, it was deemed impure and subsequently, banned after his death. Women kept it alive. It became a woman’s script, much like Japan’s Hiragana.
Bo-eum had abundant sex in her life. She had to serve men. But she never ended up writing her own Genji Monogatari.
For someone who speaks in such encoded and enigmatic manners, becoming a wordsmith would be a natural destiny. But death claims her—too soon.
She ends up as a sacrificial supporting character. Murdered, for the sake of heightening the tragedy. No one noticed she had a craft of her own—a gift of words. It was no less precious than Hwan’s talent at his own trade of illusion and no less magical.
Under the era’s norms, it was simply wasted.
Hwan-Hee: A Boy Without A Chinese Emperor
People called Hwan-hee a ‘ladykiller’. But he was to fall in love with his own Princess Charming. They’d end up rescuing each other from the Joseon Kingdom itself.
For a Korean film that capitalises on the beauties of the male body, Hwan-Hee is arguably more beautiful than the unnamed princess—it is still difficult to show attractions beyond the gender binary.
He serves the Euiju crowds every night. Yet there is no admission that those crowds are sure to have homosexuals too.
Hwarang: The Poet Warrior Youth is a landmark Korean series. It revolved around the ancient Silla Kingdom, which highly prized male beauty and recruited handsome men to the Hwarang elite force. It had a gay character, too, played by Kim Taehyung of BTS.
Human nature runs opposite to what is and isn’t allowed by social norms. Perhaps, a queer love story would not stand much chance. The stakes would rise, along with the dangers. And they’d end up staying in the closet forever—much like what happened in the series ‘The Forbidden Marriage’.
But in ancient times, emperors and kings would lose their minds over male beauty—simply because they were exempt from any sexual restrictions which applied to commoners. To be proudly and openly in love with a boy, a man had to be a monarch. The Mughal emperor Babur fell in love with Baburi Andijani, a boy from the camp bazaar.
He left behind in his memoir, Baburnama, these lines: “During this time, there was a boy from the camp market named Baburi. I made myself miserable over him.”
In an alternative universe, a Chinese emperor would disguise himself one night in the crowd, fall head over heels for Hwan, and die of lovesickness.
And that love would violate the Joseon norms.
Cheong-myeong: The Silent Princess
The unnamed princess finally gets a name when the film is almost ending: Cheong-myeong.
On screen, she is the character with the highest position of all and also with the most restrictions. While it doesn’t seem like she has her own agency in the beginning, she gradually develops her own—turning from a fake princess to almost a real one.
When she speaks her mind for the first time to the commander of her caravan, Ahn Dong-hwi (played by Lee Geung-Young), she leaves her servants stunned. They never thought she could.
It was her own small revolutionary act. To speak up and then to secure a visit to Hwan’s magic show. She camouflaged herself as one of the slaves and joined Hwan on the stage. No one must know the face of a princess, after all.
She was eventually reborn as Cheong-myeong, leaving behind her royal identity and xchanging her social rank and all future prospects of becoming a Chinese queen (or concubine) with freedom.
Her dearest possession was a pocket knife. She was saving it probably to take her own life on the bed of the Chinese emperor. Throughout the ordeal, she still remained mostly an inactive agent in her own fate. It tells viewers that they both died old in Italy.
If the story changes and takes away some of this passivity—she’d instead be given a dedicated scene to use it on the Chinese illusionist who abducted her and Hwan, perhaps all to herself.
Instead of Hwan, she’d be the angel of death. Bo-eum had to die by this illusionist’s knife a few scenes ago. Cheong-myeong could take revenge. And her limited, small acts of revolution would lose some of their limits.
Dreams, Romance and Magics
But they all followed their own destinies.
Bo-eum did not make it. At one point, she’d have to come to terms with some facts—that the love she gave to Hwan was often taken for granted, often as an unwanted obstacle standing in his way. He had his own life and dreamed of something else. And he was ready to abandon her selfishly.
Hwan’s own childhood murder, albeit in self-defence, did not take away his charms. If Cheong-myeong too murdered someone, would it have turned her into a textbook monster? Like Hwan once implied what Bo-eum was becoming? We know the love interest of the male protagonist cannot usually get blood on her hands.
The film is otherwise a wonderful montage of illusions after illusions. It went as far as to show some ancient technologies used in magic theatres. These include the sawing in half illusion, a zipline rigging system in the forest for their flying Tarzan ride, shadow and mirror illusions, covering a lake’s surface with a hidden glass for walking on water and more.
Above all, they loved each other. Hwan wanted to give her those experiences and finally, take her to Italy—because he cared for her happiness.
Bo-eum had to succumb to her fate. Her words never flourished, but Cheong-myeong didn’t. Neither did Hwan. They achieved the greatest achievement possible in their own times.
And the film has a magical heartbeat, with every scene crafted around magic—or with its anticipation in the next—something that would never end.
Tidbits of History
Though the film does not specify any specific historical events, some facts about the Qing dynasty in China are historically true. Joseon was a tributary state to the Qing and Ming.
It is questionable whether Joseon’s contemporary Italy was really a land of no discrimination and equality, as the film claims.
Like everything else in the established art scene, film too is a tool of diplomacy. ‘The Joseon Magician’ does have a very subtle undertone of anti-Chinese politics. But overall, it does not infect the story very greatly. There is no overt political statement.
At the end of the day, nothing under the sun is apolitical. Translating to the present, it is possible to read the film as a commentary on today’s entertainment industry of K-pop, K-films and K-drama.
At the core, nothing has changed except the gender norms—more relaxed but not gone. The Korean patriarchy too is still there, well and alive.
Conclusion
Yoo Seung-ho is perhaps forever etched in the audience’s memory as the Joseon magician. After eleven years, it is rather difficult to reimagine the film without him. His looks were indispensable for the script.
Go Ara played the princess. Jo Yoon-hee played Bo-eum and transformed herself into a real blind girl. She turned her eyeballs dead and frozen, never lifting her gaze once—unlike people with working eyes. There were no false looks.
The director, Kim Dae-seung, produced ‘The Sound of a Flower’ on Korea’s first female pansori singer in the same year.
The film’s Korean name is 조선마술사 (Joseonmasulsa), which literally translates into ‘The Joseon Magician’. And it is magically immersive on all counts. It is two hours of pure magic. So much so, it can illuminate the evening in your dark living room—as the clouds outside turn black.
We all imagine different destinies for ourselves. And films like this are collaborators.
Give one evening from your life to this movie. Trust me, you will not regret it.
