The Chaser
Country and Year: South Korea (2008)
Director: Na Hong-Jin
Starring: Yoon-Suk Kim, Jung-Woo Ha, Young-Hee Seo

Rating: 3 out of 4 stars (good)
Review by: Charlie Prince

South Korean thriller The Chaser is fascinatingly ambiguous. The lead is Jung Ho, a former detective played by Yoon-Suk Kim, who over the years has given in to cynicism, trading in his badge for a higher-paying living as a low-life pimp, though it has clearly not made him a happy man, or rich for that matter. In fact he’s broke, in part because he put large down payments on several new prostitutes who disappeared before they’d cleared their (and his) debts. He had assumed they’d simply run off. But, as the film starts, another girl has gone missing, Mi-Jin, and now he’s having second thoughts because he realizes that all of the missing girls were contacted by someone at the same telephone number. This sets the star scrambling to find out what’s happened, and I can tell you right now the results are going to be violent and bleak.

As soon as our star connects the dots on the missing girls, he knows there’s some foul play at hand, but he doesn’t know what the angle is. His initial assumption is a business reaction — someone has been capturing his girls and re-selling them off somewhere else. Was it the guy who sold them to him initially? Is it a competing pimp? We do know that the girl who went to him today only went because he refused to settle for any of the other girls in the “stable”, which suggests he was after someone in particular. But now he has basically vanished, as the prostitute met him on the street and went to an undisclosed location, which we know because we watched her go there, but our star Jung Ho has no way of knowing. He drags along his meathead sidekick to help him start trolling the general district door to door, which of course, generates a low likelihood of success!

Although the suspense in the film is effective, I’d actually argue that it is the character study of Jung Ho himself that makes the movie. Generally speaking, he carries with him a general air of being “put upon” at all times. Every time a problem pops up, he’s exasperated that he’s having to be bothered with it. In the opening scenes of the film (before the latest girl has disappeared) a prostitute arrives at a client’s hotel room, and (exercising what appears to be a routine process of checking to make sure nothing fishy is going on, discovers that the client was trying to illicitly videotape what was about to take place. Understandably annoyed at this, she calls him a pervert and tries to leave, prompting the client and his lunatic buddy to start roughing her up. And so, as her pimp, Jung Ho gets the call and has to come straighten the thugs out. This is something he’s good at, by the way, and you get the sense that as an undercover cop, he must have been pretty rough on the crooks he busted. But to what end? In the case of our initial encounter, he beats the bullies up a little bit, but ultimately says “so what are you going to do about this?” — meaning of course, now you have to pay up big time. In other words, he has become a base money-grubber, and when the prostitute sees him walk out with the wad of cash, even she is disgusted. She tells him she doesn’t want to do this anymore, and this time she means it. He’ll have to find another girl.

And here’s where I think the underlying heart of the movie lies — why is Jung Ho doing this? As a former cop, he presumably knew better moral times, and he’s clearly seeing day-in and day-out what these girls go through, not to mention he’s buying them like cattle. And there’s no question that he’s strong-arming them. As the film opens, Mu-Jin is obviously under the weather, and when our star, her pimp, calls, she asks for the day off. Jung Ho isn’t having any of it, demanding to know if a man is over there with her, and threatening to come over there himself (which Mi-Jin doesn’t want to have happen because she’s trying to keep her daughter a secret from him). And as we watch this, Jung Ho comes off as a complete bastard, as we in the audience see that Mi-Jin is at home with her young daughter lying in bed. The script setup is unmistakable — Jung Ho is responsible for everything that she ends up going through, which is a lot. I won’t give away the mystery of what has happened to the girls, but it doesn’t give anything away that at the end, what she ultimately ends up telling our star is very similar (though more empassioned) to what we heard from the more defiant prostitute in the opening scene. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I can’t take it.”

Another element that kept my attention wrapt to the screen was trying to decipher his motive. As indicated above, even as the search starts, he has almost nothing to go on. If the girl was sold to another pimp, she’s probably long gone. And if that’s not what’s going on, Jung Ho’s friends try to tell him, then it’s too late, she’s probably dead. But Jung Ho isn’t just trying to find her, he’s determined to — he’s almost desperate. And for a guy who has turned to pimping for the money, its odd that he keeps on searching even when it is clearly no longer in his best interest. By all appearances, he’s ready to risk everything to find this girl, why? One answer might be that he’s in love with the lady, but while that sounds good in theory, I don’t see that reflected in the film at all. And I think he’s too calculating to be doing it out of stubbornness, or some kind of outrage at some other bad guy having offended him for daring to interfere. When you peel away the other possible layers, what seems to be left is pretty intriguing: I think we’re seeing a moral crisis at work. Jung Ho, finally fully confronted with what he’s putting these girls through, is regretting the choices he made in life, and trying to do something — anything — to start to make amends. That’s pretty interesting. As the cops begin to get involved, he is confronted by ex-colleagues who loathe him for sinking to his current criminal lows. And when he inevitably searches the home of the missing girl, he finds to his great surprise that she has a young daughter, who also conveys her disgust at him (she correctly identifies him as the one who made her mother go out that night even though she was sick and didn’t want to, and goes ahead and points out that on her mother’s cell phone, Jung Ho is listed as ‘Filth’). So first the prostitute expresses her disgust at him, then his colleagues, now the little girl. Reality is starting to come crashing in.

And it’s a key ingredient. Because while the violent thriller is effective enough in itself, it’s not enough to carry the film. South Korea has seen an endless stream of violent thrillers and bleak revenge dramas in the wake of the excellent Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Memories of Murder. And as you would expect, because the South Korean film industry has drawn so heavily on these themes in the past 5 years, its becoming more and more tiresome, and harder to come up with something interesting. And I think the crisis of character angle is enough to keep the ship afloat admirably, but it’s a risky direction to take the film in. After all, we arrive at the conclusion because he doesn’t seem to have a plausible motive to explain his actions. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people take this to mean the character is badly developed and that this has severely hampered the impact of the film, assuming their not equally intrigued, as I am, about the star’s character.

There’s a minor theme I’d also like to discuss, but as fair warning, I do have to give a significant plot point away to do it. Complementing the bleak outlook of our main character and the underlying events, we see a lot of interaction with the police which is overtly cynical. When Jung Ho first sets out, he calls his old friend on the force for help. An equally dark character is now part of an elite police unit, which has been assigned to protect the city’s mayor. Just as Jung Ho calls, his friend sees a political activist throw wads of his own actual feces at the mayor in the middle of a press conference at a local fish market. Apparently the act is motivated by a man who is mad that his water supply has been cut off as part of some political showdown. But the important thing here is that this is so embarrassing for the special unit, that they are excited at the idea of playing up a possible serial killer simply to distract attention away from the embarrassing attack on the Mayor. And even worse, (here’s the plot point I warned you about), when the man who has been abducting the call girls is caught, he very matter-of-factly admits what he has done, and he’s even acting creepy in the police station. But because they don’t have any other evidence, the cops are forced to let him go. This is pretty high-level cynicism at work, and while I wouldn’t say it really adds up to much in and of itself, it does bathe the film in the reek of corruption and cynicism.

For me, I guess that adds up to enough to be impressive, especially when you consider is the director’s first feature film. It’s an interesting choice for Cannes. On the one hand it fits in nicely with the wide array of bleak, violent films that seem to define the festival’s theme this year. On the other hand, it’s arguably on the verge of being a fairly straight-forward genre film. Now, I like genre films, especially when, as with The Chaser, the suspense is laid on nice and thick, with a variety of dramatic explainings of why “time is running out”. The characters, as I’ve discussed, are interesting (the lead baddie’s character is also interesting in a simpler way, though I won’t give it away here). To the extent that the film distinguishes itself, however, from the numerous other violent Korean thrillers — which are enjoyable but not what you’d normally think of as being Cannes-material — it’s the main character’s struggle to find decency somewhere in himself, and thus, impliedly, an acknowledgment of the evils of the sex trade.

© Charlie Prince

---

Additional Links:
::: Official Listing at the Festival de Cannes Website
::: Discuss The Chaser with Others in the Movie Forum Lounge
::: Not registered for the forum? Click here to register!!