Welcome to Dongmakgol
My first encounter with this film was at the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften (of all places), when we participated at a korean movie quiz and got quite a few cute prizes including a small tea cup. Anyways, this film was shown besides the obvious “JSA” (Joint Security Area), “Taegukgi” (Taegeukgi hwinalrimyeo), “Double Agent” and another one whose name I have forgotten.
First of all, I have finally given into being a dedicate fan of korean films. The ones I have seen so far are “JSA”, “Oldboy”, “I’m a Cyborg but that’s OK”, “Bin-jip”, “My Sassy Girl”, “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance”, “Sympathy for Mrs. Vengeance”, “Wonderful Days”, “A Good Lawyer’s Wife” and this. They are very similar to films about war: either extremely brilliant or extremely horrible. I still remember how brilliant “Jarhead” was, and a plethora of other touching war stories come to mind. In the setting of wars, the great extremes and the darkest sides of humankind comes to the surface as well as the strongest bonds in interhuman relationships. Therefore, a korean movie with war or the intra-korean conflict as main topic means either that the film is going to be the best I’ve ever seen or incredibly horrible. “Welcome to Dongmakgol” definitely is among the best films I have ever seen, and I think I need to update my list of favourite movies (“Huo Zhe”/”To Live” and Dongmakgol definitely need their place in the top 10).
And now I have come to a writer’s block, because there is no way I could ever be able to find the right words to describe why this film was so extraordinary. I am surely going to dedicate a long passage to the nitpicking on this movie on Imdb, but first of all, let me just say that this film is the most outstanding one about humans, life, laughters and everything that I have seen since “Huo Zhe”. On top of that, it brought my love for films back. When I watched it, I thought I am glad to be alive because this is the kind of films whose enjoyment and meaningfulness make life worthwhile. If life has a meaning for me, then it is the eternal pursuit of something as enjoyable and sad and intense as this. (There is more than just films, of course, but right now I feel that films like Dongmakgol stand above anything else.) If I look at the list of films I have watched since I started blogging about them two years ago, there is only “Donnie Darko”, “25th Hour”, “Huo Zhe”, “Brick”, “Das Leben der Anderen”, “Harold and Maude”, “Jules et Jim”, “M” and “No Man’s Land” that have impressed me so much. (I’m going to call my son Jim!) To me, all of these films (some more than others) portray the beauty of being human, in different ways. They were all enjoyable and meaningful, only few of them are funny and all of them flesh out their characters in an extremely intense way.
So, as I hinted before, the origins of why I enjoyed Dongmakgol so much lies in its premise: It’s a korean film about the inner korean conflict during the war. On top of that, Dongmakgol is a comedy about 3 north korean soldiers, 2 south korean soldiers and 1 american pilot all stranded in a tiny village that has never seen guns completely isolated from the rest of the world. And boy, is this premise well executed. I laughed hard, so very hard that my laughter likely has drowned out the other germans’ happiness about winning the game against Portugal. Even now, I feel like crying whenever I think back at the end, and there were enough scenes that made me want to cry. The actual scene that inevitably shot tears into my eyes was the one when the naive south korean said that they “are an alliance too! It’s the north-south-korean alliance”. I found that so beautiful, as beautiful as I found their friendship. I could strongly feel with the american of not having gone to the mission with the others; if it were me, I probably could not live anymore.
Which brings us to the very asian character of the film: Just like “JSA”, and very much unlike “Oldboy” (for example), I think it is difficult to fully understand the greatness of Dongmakgol and its characters’ motivations. If your friend dies, and died because of you even when you didn’t want it, you have no reason to live anymore. If you are in the situation of the emo south korean soldier, you have every reason in the world to be emo and angsty. If you have killed your soldiers because they were weak and couldn’t walk anymore, you have no reason to live. On the other hand, Dongmakgol is trying to be very human, and especially shows the american as being one simple human being who ultimately opened himself to the koreans and genuinely became friends with them. He also had planned on going with them on their mission and only a well-calculated reason has kept him up from going with them – here, the korean scriptwriter has given the american a heroic character trait that usually is considered very “not american”. American heroes always try to survive, asian heroes are always willing to sacrifice themselves.
Today, I also watched an episode of “Eureka Seven” that involved bombings. I immediately thought of Dongmakgol and feel that I am never going to see bombs in the old light again. I guess the image in the film was just too powerful.
In the same way, I find people’s nitpicking about this film extremely ignorant. The main issue definitely is the bad way americans are portrayed in the film, which I can kind of understand (but it really does not matter), and another much sillier issue is how there actually exist people in the world who find it ridiculous that there are south koreans shooting “their own side” (the americans, that is). The actual message of the whole film is anti-war in general, and they were not shooting the others in the first place, they were deviating the bombs. Gosh. Oh well.
Finally, the last scene had quite an impact on me actually, especially since the “all the characters sleeping together” image is one of my favourite. Sleeping together has a stong symbolism for me, partially because of superstition I suppose. The last scene of Dongmakgol is very similar to how the last scene of JSA is constructed and bears the same tragedy, however, I think that there still is quite a difference: In Dongmakgol, the characters were never torn apart and had the luck (?) of staying together until the end; in JSA, the message of political issues tearing brothers and friends apart is underlined by the last scene in which the characters are shown together. In that respect, I understand why the last scene of JSA coupled with a beautiful song ultimately had a stronger impact on me than Dongmakgol.
On a side note, I ended up watching JSA again the next day, and I realized that after the 4th and 5th time I am watching it, I don’t feel the story that intensely anymore. Besides the fact that I have known about the story, I think parts of it is that I wanted to avoid getting affected by the tragedy too much and so I was actively trying not to let its sadness get too close to me.
Now that my attempt of writing a blog post worthy of the film has completely gotten lost, I shall stop now. As you can see from my rambling tone and the length, the film has had a strong impact on me and I heartily recommend “Welcome to Dongmakgol”.