Stream K-Dramas at OnDemandKorea

[HanCinema's Hall of Fame Review] "Castaway on the Moon": Fantastical!

In the spotlight this week: Lee Hae-joon's "Castaway on the Moon"...

Advertisement

Lee's sophomore film gets straight to point and jumps off. Kim Seung-geun (Jung Jae-young) owes $210,308 to "Happy Cash Private Loans", and he's about to commit suicide by jumping into the Han. He hangs up the phone and plunges into the murky river without further ado; a leap of faith that was not, however, enough to break his pitiful contract with life. He soon wakes up washed up on a small, uninhabited, island smack in the middle of Seoul's Han. Soaked and shell-shocked, Kim tries to get off the island to head towards Korea's famous, and gold-cast, '63' building on Yeouido: Seoul's steepest structure that would surely do a better job than that backstabbing bridge.

Unfortunately for Kim his attempts to find a way off and contact the outside world fail miserably. His phone's bloated and sandy, the shores are too far to cry out to, traffic above is brutal and abuzz, and his lame attempts to signal help to a passing ferry fell face first. For the foreseeable future, this small, uninteresting length of land is his entire world; he's alone now, and free from the debt and failure of his recent past.

Lee and his team have managed to transform a freckle of green in Seoul's heart into a Robinson Crusoe-type trauma crossed with "Rear Window" wonderment. Unlike Defoe's master-slave dialectic, Lee introduces a strange and afflicted young loner, a Japanese Hikikomori of sorts, who spends her entire day locked up and alone. When she's not following her regimented life to the step and calorie, she indulges his her favourite hobbies: moon gazing and photography. With her well-endowed Sony she snaps pics of the man in moon, but on one special day she discovers a message on beachfront across from her window. Intrigued, and somehow also compelled, Kim (Jung Ryeo-won) continues to keep track of the madman on the island and after compiling a pretty impressive visual diary on his hilariously and heartfelt moments, she decides to make contact with this curious creature.

This film was a real treat: a dramatic and detailed look at two tragedies becoming one entertaining and energised epic. Lee and his team were dedicated to infecting their flick with mouth-watering moments of magic, fantastical scenes that were powerfully accented against the relentless and rough ridges of reality both Kims endure. It reminded me a lot of, strangely, of "Oasis" and, more immediately, "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK" as both films are compelling and character-drive dramas and contain varying degrees of magic-realism to great effect. I thoroughly enjoyed by those two films, and "Castaway on the Moon" has indeed just rocketed up my list of Korean favourites.

The premise is pleasingly original, and the character's and their worlds are interesting and immersive; the camera framing of these two lost souls was so sharp, its target so surreal, and everything it captured was cruelly crisp and awe-smackingly cinematic; Ryeo-won, as the hermitic heroine, was wonderful and sympathetic, too, while Jae-yeong was dynamic, funny, and expressive; the compositions were inviting and often quite dreamy: black holes really that distorted the character's 'real world' in favour of personal fantasies and integrated imagination.

The writing was sharp and edgy, too, with perhaps my favourite line coming from Kim's narration when he starts eating the fish the bird he catches, reflecting on his meals that: "Perhaps evolution is the process of becoming tastier"; later these words will come back to haunt us as Kim takes a licking liking to his own sweaty body. The comedy is punchy, poignant and tactfully twisted into the film's melancholic backdrop. The manic magic and lurid visuals are what I enjoyed most, but there is so much "Castaway on the Moon" that everyone will be able to find a treasure or two of their own. Fantastical!

 

- C.J. Wheeler (chriscjw@gmail.com@KoreaOnTheCouch)

 

Available on DVD from YESASIA

DVD Single Disc (En Sub)

❎ Try Ad-free