Midway through M, the novelist Min-woo types a repeated phrase on his computer, not unlike Jack Torrance in The Shining: “more specific, less poetic. more specific, less poetic…” I’m not sure what Min-woo thinks of this advice (he does subsequently press the delete button), but if the completed film is any indication, director Lee Myung-Se seems not to hold it in very high regard. M is a film filled with gorgeous imagery, flights of fancy, and bursts of color. However it makes very little effort to tie these images down into the world of people and things.

I wonder: are the “specific” and the “poetic” mutually exclusive? Many poets seem to go out of their way to immerse themselves in the specific and the concrete, and to my ears at least, it makes their work more poetic. Min-woo mentions James Joyce at one point in the film: perhaps the labyrinthine, complex architecture of a novel like Ulysses (or Finnegan’s Wake) is what Lee Myung-Se is after. Still, M feels to me like a sad contradiction: the imagery beckons with sensual force, but the film throws up so many riddles and mind games that you’re too preoccupied to feel its beauty.

M There’s none of Fritz Lang in M — this is not an homage to the 1931 classic. Lee claims instead that the film’s genesis came when Alfred Hitchcock visited him in a dream, presenting him with a book marked “M” on the cover. But I don’t think even Hitchcock ever indulged himself so fabulously as Lee does here. M feels like the dream sequences that you sometimes see in other movies, except that it lasts for the entire film.

It’s customary in a film review to introduce the plot, though even after watching M I’m still a bit in the dark. Let me offer up some observations instead: there is a novelist named Min-woo, who is feeling pressure to write his next book, though the words seem slow in coming. There is a young woman named Mimi, who may or may not exist, who pursues, and then is pursued by, Min-woo (is she his muse?). There is also a woman named Eun-hye who is engaged to Min-woo. They live together in a gorgeous apartment.

Gong Hyo-jin (Family Ties, Conduct Zero) plays the role of Min-woo’s fiancee Eun-hye. Gong is a truly exciting actress — her strength lies in the knife’s edge to her voice, her “don’t give me any bullshit” attitude, and the way that her characters always sound so grounded in reality. Yet in M her fiance, and indeed the film itself, seems to resent her for these qualities. If so, it’s a particularly cruel bit of casting — to choose an actress for her strengths, and then to make them seem like faults. Lee Yeon-hee’s Mimi, by contrast, is the “poetic” to Gong’s “specific”. I’m a big fan of Lee as well — her strength is her natural charm and screen presence, rather than her acting per se. Some actors just need to put themselves in front of the camera in order to make an impression. While watching this film, unable to make sense of what I was seeing, I spent most of the time simply waiting for Mimi to show up again in her purple dress.

But perhaps I’m being unfair to Gang Dong-won, who plays Min-woo. At the start of his career, I had a hard time understanding why many Koreans considered him so attractive (especially in his debut film, Too Beautiful To Lie). But he’s looking pretty fabulous here, in his small, dark glasses and black jacket. It can’t have been an easy role to play, either, with his character often flitting back and forth between dreamy romanticism and absurdist outbursts. Whatever you think of his performance here, Gang is establishing himself as a key actor of his generation.

With this film, I find myself on the unfamiliar side of a common debate. I’m generally not the kind of person who fixates on plot or tight narrative, in fact I often find it refreshing when filmmakers — such as Lee Eung-su in Desire or Lee Myung-Se himself in First Love or Nowhere to Hide — toss the plot aside for a while to focus on the image, all by itself. Still, despite the best efforts of its actors, much of M feels like an inside joke. In the films I mention above, the images pull emotions from the viewer, but here it’s like I’m watching someone else’s feelings on the screen.

M has not gone over particularly well in Korea. Walking out of the theater, I overheard a middle school student in front of me saying, “I tried to get some sleep, but the music kept waking me up.” Viewers posting on the internet have called Lee a “swindler” for disguising a very personal, idiosyncratic film in such commercial trappings. That’s perhaps unfair — I think that Lee did genuinely hope to connect with his audience this time. But sadly, due to runaway ambition, miscalculation, or perhaps some other reason, M took a wrong turn and never made it home.

Source:Koreanfilm