{"id":4958,"date":"2020-02-13T17:46:30","date_gmt":"2020-02-14T01:46:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4958"},"modified":"2020-02-13T17:46:54","modified_gmt":"2020-02-14T01:46:54","slug":"korea-blog-the-american-dream-dies-in-los-angeles-in-bae-chang-hos-deep-blue-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4958","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: The American Dream Dies in Los Angeles in Bae Chang-Ho\u2019s “Deep Blue Night”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Speeding through the desert in a convertible, blasting \u201cHighway Star\u201d on the radio: as much appeal as that fantasy has held for Americans, it\u2019s held even more for non-Americans. Such a scene opens\u00a0Deep Blue Night<\/em>\u00a0(\uae4a\uace0 \ud478\ub978 \ubc24), a Korean film shot entirely in the US and intensely, even grimly concerned with the broader notion of the \u201cAmerican dream.\u201d At the wheel of the car \u2014 incongruously, not an American classic like a Mustang or a Corvette, but a Mercedes \u2014 is a Korean man of about thirty. In the passenger\u2019s seat is a girl, another essential element of the fantasy, but before long the man will have abandoned her in Death Valley, having roughed her up, relieved her of an envelope full of cash and, deaf to her entreaties, continued on his way. What looked like a simple living of the dream turns out to be part of a mission before which morality is clearly no object.<\/p>

The man\u2019s name is Baek Ho-bin, and Los Angeles is the destination of a months-long journey that began in his homeland. From there he first made his way to Mexico, then crossed the border into San Diego, where he met the young lady, a fellow Korean, whom he left in the desert. In Los Angeles he connects with another Korean woman, a bartender who introduces herself only as \u201cJane.\u201d An American citizen, Jane runs a side business entering into sham green-card marriages in exchange for money, just the service for a man like Ho-bin eager to bring his wife and unborn child over from Korea. In time she lets Ho-bin live in her hillside house, and even sets him up with a job at a convenience store. That the cynical operator eventually develops genuine feelings for the handsome rogue may at first seem like a clich\u00e9 straight out of a romantic comedy with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere \u2014 whom Ahn Sung-ki, a child star in the 1950s and now an icon of Korean cinema, resembles in the role of Ho-bin.<\/p>

Ahn looks and acts most like Gere as he appears in movie that certainly doesn\u2019t count as romantic comedy, but does count among the underrated Los Angeles movies of the 1980s: Jim McBride\u2019s American remake of Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s\u00a0Breathless<\/em>, which is more respectable than it sounds. Whereas most American versions of foreign films lighten up the originals, McBride\u2019s\u00a0Breathless<\/em>\u00a0darkens Godard\u2019s debut down, replacing its doomed romantic flair with a nihilistic seediness befitting the change of setting. It also swaps the nationalities of the main characters: Jean Seberg\u2019s Patricia becomes Val\u00e9rie Kaprisky\u2019s French UCLA student Monica, and Jean-Pierre Belmondo\u2019s Michel becomes Gere\u2019s murderous drifter Jesse. Each in his own way, both Jesse and Ho-bin are archetypes of the aggressive young man in America, the former native-born and full of aimless vitality, the latter a new arrival on the make. Neither show any compunction when dealing \u2014 sexually, violently, or both \u2014 with those in the way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speeding through the desert in a convertible, blasting \u201cHighway Star\u201d on the radio: as much appeal as that fantasy has held for Americans, it\u2019s held even more for non-Americans. Such a scene opens\u00a0Deep Blue Night\u00a0(\uae4a\uace0 \ud478\ub978 \ubc24), a Korean film shot entirely in the US and intensely, even grimly concerned with the broader notion of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,74,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-korea-blog","category-los-angeles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4958"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4960,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958\/revisions\/4960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}