An ambitious film from South Korea based on a Murakami story: Burning

Chang-Dong Lee is one of the many fine directors from South Korea (Oasis, Poetry) who hasn't by any means become a household name in the U.S. but who continues to writer and direct highly intelligent and engrossing movies, the latest of which is Burning (2018, avail on Netflix). I wouldn't say it's a great movie, but it has some great moments and scenes and is a puzzling, disturbing study in character. In brief the plot in involves a young man, son of a dirt-poor farmer living in the distant suburbs of Seoule,  who says he wants to be a writer and that he is working on a novel, though there's little evidence that he's really doing so. At the outset, he meets an attractive young woman who was a neighbor when they were children; she invites him to her apartment, where they have sex; she is obviously much more experienced and worldly than he is. She is about to leave for Africa - clearly, a vacation she cannot afford - and asks him to stop by daily to feed her cat. When she returns, she calls and asks him to pick her up at the airport, and she arrives accompanied by another Korean man, a little older, extremely wealthy, and in every sense a despicable character. The lead character - Jong-su - is obviously troubled and puzzled by the appearance of this rival. So to this point it appears we're looking at a love-triangle movie: Will the sad but likable man win? But gears shift. The young woman vanishes, and attempts to find her lead Jong-su down many strange pathways. The ending is a bit of a shock - I won't give it away - and I didn't quite understand all of the elements. In part this confusion and oddity comes about because this movie is an adaptation of a Murakami story, Barn Burning; Marukami always moves his narratives into strange and disturbing places, sometimes to great effect - but the effect wears a little thin in cinema, where everything looks "real" (whereas in fiction, we can believe more oddities and ambiguity because the images are all "in our minds"). There are beautiful moments throughout - the nighttime driving through the Korean countryside, the young woman's stone dancing, the views from her apartment of the crowded, thriving city, to name a few. That's probably enough to make the film worth watching, though the plot and its resolution will probably puzzle most viewers. [ See related post on Elliotsreading]