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South Korean audiences have turned out in force for\u00a0Burning<\/em>\u00a0(\ubc84\ub2dd), the latest feature from Lee Chang-dong, which opened here the day after it played at Cannes. Its success so far doesn\u2019t come as a surprise, due not just to the strong buzz generated (albeit not from a Palme d\u2019Or win) at the festival, but the combined enthusiasm of two separate but dedicated fan bases as well. Lee, one of the most respected Korean filmmakers alive, hasn\u2019t made a film since 2010\u2019s\u00a0Poetry<\/em>\u00a0(\uc2dc). His latest comes based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer quite popular worldwide but\u00a0especially so here<\/a>. This cinematic adaptation \u2014 and considerable expansion \u2014 not only conjures up a suitably uncanny Murakamian mood, but also makes use of a few of his\u00a0signature tropes<\/a>: a vanishing cat, a dried-up well.<\/p>\n
Murakami\u2019s casual readers will already be chuckling in recognition, but his hardcore fans, who know that\u00a0Burning<\/em>\u00a0takes as its basis the story \u201cBarn Burning\u201d (originally published in 1992, as translated by Philip Gabriel,\u00a0in the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em><\/a>), may feel confused: that work counts among his few that involve neither a cat nor a well. Lee and his collaborators have thus, on one level, taken a Murakami story and, in expanding its scant 10 pages into nearly two and a half hours, made it more Murakamiesque. But they\u2019ve also Koreanized it, using Korean settings, Korean characters, and intensely Korean themes. Lee, who in his 60s remains enough of an angry young man to repeatedly title his works-in-progress\u00a0\u201cProject Rage,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0has imbued Murakami\u2019s observant disaffection with simmering, ultimately explosive anger.<\/p>\n
\u201cI met her at the wedding party of an acquaintance and we got friendly,\u201d begins Murakami\u2019s story as translated by Alfred Birnbaum in the collection\u00a0The Elephant Vanishes<\/em>. The narrator is a married 31-year-old writer; the girl, a 23-year-old pantomime student and part-time ad model. Her \u201cguileless simplicity\u201d attracts \u201cthe kind of men who had only to set eyes on this simplicity of hers before they\u2019d be dressing it up with whatever feelings they held inside.\u201d But not so much the narrator, who simply invites her out to eat or drink with her once or twice a month, picking up the bill every time. Only in her presence, he realized, can he truly relax: \u201cI\u2019d forget all about work I didn\u2019t want to do and trivial things that\u2019d never be settled anyway and the crazy mixed-up ideas that crazy mixed-up people had taken into their heads. It was some kind of power she had.\u201d<\/p>\n