[HanCinema's Film Review] "Peppermint Candy"

Yong-ho (played by Sol Kyung-gu) is severely depressed. But he has no perception that he is depressed, nor does he seem to have any real idea as to the cause. It's not necessarily a matter of his being a bad person- though Yong-Ho is very much a loathsome human being. After awhile, the realization that he's about to make another decision just inspires a great deal of dread. Most of the other characters he meets would have been better off just giving up on him quickly. The ones who stick around just have more emotional pain as a reward.

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Which is still pretty fortunate for them. They can escape another person, sooner or later. But Yong-ho, for all his tremendous effort, can't run away from himself and is soon forced with the essential question of his life. As a man who became an adult in South Korea during the eighties, his life seems dominated by historical events over which he has no control.

And yet he does have a choice. Time and again, Yong-ho is given another chance to make the right decision- something he knows that he should do, but inevitably does not. The people around him who keep giving him chances to redeem himself and are inevitably disappointed and sad in their own tragic way. They think they can make Yong-ho happy by giving him what he wants. They fail to realize that Yong-ho's warped desires are the actual problem, and that ingratiation will only make this problem worse.

I can, bizarrely enough, sympathize with Yong-ho's fixations. I suspect anyone can, really. We all have some mementos of the past, some nostalgic reaction that helps us reminisce on times go by. But Yong-ho's obsession with these artifacts, these abstract ideals of what he thinks life ought to be, simply goes too far. He barely has any recognition of the idea that he himself is an actual person with serious desires and needs.

It comes as little surprise, then, that he treats the wishes of other people so trivially, and is unwilling to make the slightest accomodation to other people when it interferes with whatever he wants at that given moment. The idea that he can become happy himself by trying to make other people happy is beyond him. So he fixates on his mementos, understanding their literal meaning to him while failing to grasp their larger symbolic importance in the narrative of his own life.

"Peppermint Candy" is an extremely taxing film. Director Lee Chang-dong shows a precuationary portrait of how easy it is for a person to slide down to ever-increasing levels of faux-happiness and existential anger until eventually, finally, everything comes crashing down completely and it seems like there's no way out. Still, by the end, Yong-ho has some idea of just what he's done and how he's failed- and how little any of it has to do with the people that can be most directly and easily blamed. It's certainly a fact worth considering in our own lives. As harsh as Yong-ho's coming of age was, I can't help but wonder whether some other excuse in some other country would have broken him just as easily.

Review by William Schwartz

"Peppermint Candy" is directed by Lee Chang-dong and features Sol Kyung-gu, Moon So-ri  and Kim Yeo-jin.

 

Available on DVD and Blu-ray from YESASIA