If You Are Reborn, Which Country Will You Choose?

I guess it comes to this. Everything. All of it.

I had a number of scattered sentences lying all over my drafts, mostly fragments of dialogue, for weeks now, before I could start writing this review.

After all, there are two Koreas in the world. One was claimed by the devil, or so they say, and the other is a mini-paradise.

I picked two South Korean films to see how they treated the subject throughout the ages. The first one comes from 1954, The Hand of Destiny (운명의 손/Unmyeong-ui son), and the other was made twelve years ago—Secretly, Greatly (2013, 은밀하게 위대하게/Eunmilhage widaehage).

Both of them are spy dramas. Both attempt to demonize and humanize North Koreans at the same time. And both try to faintly remember that once they were just Koreans, though neither dares completely to speak it out.

My thoughts turned into murmurings. They started losing their meaning because we exist on the other side of the propaganda. We spread propaganda and get propagandized. On either side, staunch belief systems exist on what’s going on across the border.

In the 2022 Korean series The Golden Spoon, the protagonist was a teenager. He was lamenting his birth in South Korea, ‘a fine country’ which offered him nothing, because he was born poor in South Korea. And without a magic spoon that had the power to transform him into his rich classmate, he would have had to struggle to make ends meet.

The two Koreas are just as much a prince and the pauper story. North Koreans famously want to exchange their lives with South Koreans and occupy the Southern bodies. When we cannot verify the extent of bestiality that really happens, we do remember—stories of our own.

And Korea becomes a mirror soon, to reflect them.

Fragments: The Hand of Destiny

My fragments from the film are as follows:

The Shots

An overdramatic story. Close-ups on a hand holding a pipe. A glass full of water spills. The shot cuts to the next.

This was looking rather amateurish, but the fact is, in 1954, textbook grammars of shots weren’t as developed. You had to invent your own, at times.

Even today, our first attempts at making a film almost always look childish. Our first drafts of mise-en-scène are somehow very close. They look like what a professional cinematographer would do with his camera in the 1950s.

Especially zooming on hands—it has its own dramatic effect. And the film also began with an owl clock, wiggling its eyes, scanning the room with a man and a woman together. This was shot to create the atmosphere.

Then came a goblin ring at one point. Secret messages disguised as music notes, written by a madame of a cabaret. Then came a wine bottle lying on an ashtray, uncorked, almost as if the wine was poured into the ashes of cigarettes—to tell the audience of sexual intercourse.

All these were dominating features. And yet, the shots looked somewhat disjointed, often roughly sewn together and a bit forced. Just as its poor foley sounds, bearing all the signatures of a low-budget movie. They do create tension during the shooting scene, though, despite sounding often ridiculous and hollow.

But Korea was war-torn. It is already exquisitely wonderful that some people had a budget at all to make a film.

The Womanhood

It happens to be a woman-centric film. The luxury apartment where the North Korean spy girl lives can evoke people’s jealousy in the Global South to this day.

She is called a ‘vulgar’, ‘impure’ woman, a social outcast, and so on, who makes the mistake of loving her enemy. Certainly, in today’s day and era, being a cabaret dancer wouldn’t have been that much of a big issue.

Her lover is yet another South Korean police officer, disguised as a student-cum-day laborer. His professor once spots him taking a huge load on his shoulder—a literal heavy load.

These were all features of an era, I was thinking. When the man asks her in one scene what’s wrong with being a prostitute—a liberal dialogue in a cop’s mouth—it was sounding like he was offering her salvation. The South Korean gets to play Jesus, and the North Korean, a Mary Magdalene.

But Margaret/Jung-ae would die in his hands in the end. So would her commander. She never became the villain she could have been, but she was probably cunning enough for 1954. At the end of the day, she remained a woman who first believed in her country and then lost the belief, too. She fell in love, tried to break free, and had to surrender. The man, Young-chul, knew nothing of it. He had no idea the extent to which she was going for him. And the final bullet probably asked the South Korean of that time what they were doing themselves.

And after all these years, we are left wondering what killed Margaret—her North Korean identity or her inescapable womanhood itself.

The Question

The Korean War barely ended in 1953. The memories were still fresh, of Koreans killing Koreans. The fact that Young-chul never realized Margaret’s love and had no ability to return it was probably a dark irony thrown at the South Koreans. It was almost like an apology for the state of affairs, for how things have been after Japan left their country and it was divided into two.

For all its theatrics, the style of their dialogue delivery is very different from how it is now. It doesn’t match the grammar of today’s Korean films, but it somehow sounds more natural. And it sounds more truthful, somehow.

The question still lingers: What is your nationality? This was what Young-chul wanted to ask Margaret. And it ended with a bullet in her chest.

Fragments: Secretly, Greatly

The question remained the same in the year 2013, when Secretly, Greatly was born. In a nutshell, it is a spy drama with the finest and top-class spies from North Korea. Their mission is to play village idiots in Seoul.

This is why scenes of rocket launching are juxtaposed with carrying out duties like taking a dump on the road to ‘make it believable’ to the enemy country’s citizens that the spy is a mentally challenged person with profound intellectual handicaps. It is called the ‘mission for our great nation’.

The idea of nationalism came under heavy attack in the film. It is easier when the nation in question is North Korea or Iran. The filmmaker left all the clues that it perhaps applied equally to South Korea, too. But as it goes, that remains vague.

Features of North Korea

The South Korean girl with a reprehensible lifestyle, by now, in the holy year of 2013, walks the street in dresses that show her cleavage in the sketchy outskirts of the city, where people are probably waiting for a redevelopment. The North Korean whispers in his mind, ‘you’d get killed in the republic for wearing that’.

‘My words are laws’, shouts the landlady’s son. He is an employee there. But the landlady is not Kim Jong-un.

His real name is Ryu Hwan, but he’s using a fake name here: Dong-gu. He dreams of going home rich. He gets chased wearing a bra, all the while imagining he is turning into a superman.

However, it almost looks like North Korean agents are trained to be supermen. Ryu is believable enough as someone with stunted brain growth. South Korean kids were throwing rocks at him. In the climax, they were to be caught in the shootouts, rising tensions to the peaks.

The older agent’s family is said to be abducted, for ‘betraying the republic’. He warns him, ‘stay loyal to the republic until the day you die’. And if they don’t, they become ‘the dog of the South’.

The younger agent, literally an underage boy, sheds tears of joy, ‘captain remembers me’! It almost starts looking homoerotic, secretly. He visibly has a crush on Ryu. At one point, he stops hiding it, even after being captured by the South Korean police.

All their families are held hostage back at home. They know if they do anything out of line here in the South, their loved ones will be in danger in the North.

In the end, however, they are told to commit suicide—their final mission.

The Questions, Again

In 2013, the questions too have evolved. It is no longer just ‘what is your nationality’.

By now, the North Korean spies were wondering whether to betray their country or not, and what was the point of returning.

‘Salmon returns home and dies after it spawns’, as one puts it.

Halfway through, the comedy stops and things get dead serious. Suh Sung-go, the older agent, is revealed as a professor. He tells Ryu Hwan that ‘all families of the 5446 unit, to which all of them belonged, were imprisoned’. And probably none were alive by now.

This almost takes away Ryu Hwan’s reasons to live. And he asks the old commander a daring question, ‘what matters to the country, then?’

It erupts into a song instead, Imjin River. A song that is banned in North Korea, or so they say. Ryu Hwan starts playing it on his guitar. It is almost like a last feast, a final toast to life.

And all these questions were nowhere just reserved for North Korea. They were all trying to figure out the point of life, and how the idea of a nation heavily disrupted it. Did the nation exist for them, or was it them who had to exist for it? Who took away their lives in the end—North Korea or the South?

These questions apply equally to every other scenario in the world, from Russia and Ukraine to India and Pakistan and more.

The Sensible South Koreans

Secretly, Greatly has a granny. She tells her Dong-gu to stay out of trouble, not knowing who he is. She probably could not imagine in her wildest dreams he was an agent of an enemy country.

The last scene in the rain, where Ryu Hwan died, had a savings book falling out of his pocket. It was her last gift to him. She treated him as her own son.

In all of this, it is said that ‘eating is more important than serving the country’. It is very prominently featured as a South Korean dialogue. When they are facing the Northerners, they start making a whole lot of sense, as always.

But to speak sensibly, a North Korean’s presence seems essential as well. Otherwise, it is rather unclear whether South Koreans too can live up to the standard and practice what they preach.

The Actors

Lee Hyang and Yun In-ja once played the protagonists of The Hand of Destiny. Han Hyeong-Mo was the director. The film is largely remembered for ‘the first onscreen kiss’, and everything that came after. Kiss was humanism, country wasn’t. The very idea of a country stood against it. 

Kim Soo-Hyun is the protagonist of Secretly, Greatly and Jang Cheol-So was the director. He has been facing controversies after controversies after Kim Sae-ron’s death. She was revealed as his ex-girlfriend whom he could not protect. Sae-ron committed suicide after two years of enduring yellow magazines printing stories against her, following her own drunk driving incident.

When the controversy is pinned on Soo-hyun, and the fact is, Korean men are first-rate misogynists to this day, it is not all about him. Sae-ron died by her own industry. It made her a subject of cheap celebrity gossip articles after she lost her stardom.

It is very true that Soo-hyun, being a man, had a chance to recover from what destroyed his career. Sae-ron did not have that chance. But turning the focus solely on him allowed the industry to escape scrutiny from the public eye. The subject of the social media trial was less concerned with how the Korean tabloids, magazines, talent agencies, and corporations handle their talents.

No one can verify how guilty Soo-hyun is in all this, but he was the perfect scapegoat. Being a man, he knew this too would be over someday. The storm would pass, and he’d do just fine.

Sae-ron died. Not in North Korea, in the South.

The Final Question

Ryu died with Rhee Hae-jin in the end, the little boy sent by North Korea to watch him. He looked deeply betrayed by his country, way more than what Ryu could bring himself to think about it.

Rhee was the one who was planning to desert and totally abandon North Korea, forget all about it, and try for a life in the South.

In the end, his voice asks, ‘what kind of man do you want to be when you are reborn?’

Ryu’s voice replies, ‘an ordinary man living in a peaceful country’.

The audience from the conflict zones, meanwhile, never found it. None of us know whether that country exists or not. The global immigrants, refugees, and the displaced have no idea—from Ukraine to Myanmar to Palestine.

Does the country exist? Or was it us who were forced to exist for it?

If we are reborn, can we choose our own countries in the next lifetime?