“Sometimes I burn down greenhouses”. Five words that ignite Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, his first film in eight years, and set in motion a hazy, obsessive descent into chaos and paranoia. Based on a short story by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami and transplanted from Japan to the South Korean border city of Paju, Burning treads a similar if not identical path to the original text: Jong-su’s blossoming but casual relationship with Hae-mi, a pantomime student, is interrupted by the continued presence of the enigmatic Ben who, superficially at least, is her new lover. Soon after Ben tells Jong-su that he burns down greenhouses in his spare time, Hae-mi disappears without a trace. There are, of course, differences between Lee’s film and Murakami’s story besides the geographical switch. Jong-su is, here, a young graduate working odd jobs in the city while writing a novel in his spare time, whereas the equivalent character in the original text was a married, thirty-one year old author who becomes enthralled by Hae-mi but doesn’t have a history with her, as he does in the adaptation. In the story, her new boyfriend is younger than the narrator, but in Burning, the ages are reversed. Lee and co-writer Oh Jung-mi have also expanded Murakami’s text far beyond its original conclusion, keeping the elusive mystery at its heart in tact while digging a little further, opening new avenues that the short story carefully hinted at but never set out to explore — which is not to say Burning is any more conclusive or any less eerie than its source.
The most important of these changes is the switch to focus solely on young people. The dynamic of a married older man becoming jealous of a younger man’s imposition into a non-existent relationship with a young woman is not especially fertile ground, and Lee wisely avoids this in favour of grounding the conflict firmly in the rage felt by young people in Korea today, in the midst of a surge in youth unemployment. Jong-su has an education but no future prospects, taking on physical labour to earn a living: first making deliveries in the city, then caretaking his absent father’s ailing farm in the nearby countryside, where the sounds of North Korean propaganda broadcasts can be heard across the border. He meets Hae-mi, a girl he knew at school but doesn’t recognise anymore, herself estranged from her family due to credit card debts, and the two embark upon a fleeting romance. He gives her a pink digital watch that he wins in a raffle. They have sex in her tiny apartment, a room only ever illuminated briefly when the sunlight bounces fortuitously off a tower that looms large through the window. She goes on a trip to Africa and asks him to feed her cat until she returns. He does, but when she returns, she does so with Ben, a mysteriously moneyed man and the only Korean she met in Africa, only slightly older than the two of them but evidently more financially successful. He has a huge apartment in a plush building in the middle of the city, and he drives a charcoal-grey Porsche 911 Carrera. Ben’s sudden entrance, and his usurping of a fledgeling relationship, sparks a simmering jealousy within Jong-su, compounded by Hae-mi’s insistence on keeping both men in her life. And, so, the trio spend odd, protracted time together. They eat, drink, go to clubs, smoke. Jong-su compares Ben to Jay Gatsby and asks Hae-mi how much older he is than him, while Ben doesn’t say very much at all. He has everything Jong-su could ever want, but he doesn’t seem to do anything to earn it: when asked, Ben describes his work as “play”. But sometimes he burns down greenhouses. Roughly one every two months, he tells Jong-su, and he’s planning on burning down another one nearby.
Lee Chang-dong, a novelist before he turned to filmmaking, has an impressive track-record as a weaver of ambitious, intricately detailed and socially conscious narrative cinema. In Green Fish, his first film, an ex-soldier is lured into the criminal underworld by the prospect of earning enough money to do right by his family, displaced by the rampant development of their hometown. Peppermint Candy shows the life of a man in reverse, beginning with his suicide and tracking how his life has been destroyed in parallel with terrible events in the recent history of South Korea. In Oasis, Lee explores a taboo relationship between a mentally disabled man and a woman with cerebral palsy, while in Secret Sunshine, a single mother turns to religion after suffering unspeakable trauma, only to find the man who ruined her life has done the same. Poetry, his last film, follows an elderly woman trying to find meaning in the world around her by writing poetry, even as she’s forced into a morally repugnant cover-up to keep her grandson and his friends out of prison. Burning is more of the same. By positioning Jong-su and Ben, two men who exist at opposite ends of a generation that has long-since peaked, one a beneficiary of its early days, the other a victim of its decline, against each other, Lee makes literal the tension between the poor and the wealthy, and the resentment caused by a failure of the Korean government to create enough jobs for its young people over the duration of two administrations. Starting in 2012, former President Park Geun-hye was elected on a platform of steering the country towards a “creative economy”, encouraging entrepreneurship and job development in creative and innovation sectors. However, by 2014, youth unemployment rates were beginning to rise, and have been trending upwards ever since. Following Park’s impeachment for abuse of power, for which she is serving 24 years in prison, in 2016, President Moon Jae-in was elected on, again, a platform of job creation, and has introduced a higher base minimum wage with the intent of increasing economic growth by providing Koreans with a higher base income. However, this increase has put financial pressure on small businesses, forcing them to cut staff or shut down entirely, and has further lowered the number of available jobs.
Within this political and economic turbulence, it’s no wonder that Jong-su is immediately resentful of the comfortably and flashily wealthy Ben, and when Hae-mi suddenly vanishes this resentment develops into an all-consuming obsession: does Ben know more than he’s saying? Jong-su checks all the greenhouses in the area and none have been burned down. He instigates supposedly chance encounters with Ben to press him for answers. He visits Hae-mi’s family, and searches for clues in Ben’s apartment. He waits outside and closely tails Ben’s Porsche in a beaten-up pick-up truck, a vehicle totally at odds with the city traffic, borrowed from his father’s farm, following him aimlessly around town on the off-chance that he’s going to incriminate himself. These silent, brutally tense scenes, oscillating between shots of traffic seen through windscreens and close-ups of Jong-su’s tired but laser-focused eyes, are clearly inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo, another tale of transformative obsession. Like James Stewart in Vertigo, Jong-su has no idea what he’s getting himself into, and it’s hard to imagine that Ben doesn’t know he’s being followed. Lee, like Murakami, never clarifies details such as this, instead letting the ambiguities linger like a fog to ratchet up a dangerous tension — one that renders a knock on a car window one of the most terrifying moments in recent cinema.
As his quest for answers delivers nothing but frustration and dead ends, these ambiguities begin to look like facts to Jong-su. All the pieces fit together, but never conclusively. Every thread he pulls can be explained rationally. He buys into the idea that Ben could be responsible for Hae-mi’s disappearance with no proof. All he has is his anger towards a man who has everything he could ever want, and five words that have haunted him since he heard them: “Sometimes I burn down greenhouses.” It’s this resentment, established early on in the financial and romantic disparity between the two men, that drives Burning towards its conclusion. Lee creates tension from a place of random inequality, and the seething rage that stems from it within Jong-su. Hard workers don’t thrive in Burning’s Korea, playboys do, and it’s this idea that poisons Jong-su’s judgment, leaving him haunted by the ghost of a metaphor that might not even be metaphorical. He has so much faith in himself, in his rightness, that he has nowhere to go when he runs out of ideas. In this sense, Burning is a devastatingly sad film about a generation too young to benefit from the past and too old to benefit from the future, left to rot in limbo in the present. “Every morning, I still run past those five barns. Not one of them has yet burned down. Nor do I hear of any barn fires. Come December, the birds strafe overhead. And I keep on getting older.” Murakami’s story feels sparse and empty. Burning feels like an abyss.