Peppermint Candy

Peppermint Candy (1999)

Written and Directed by: Lee Chang-dong - The director of Burning (2018)

The film opens with the suicide of the protagonist and then it explores what all he had gone through by flashbacks, in reverse chronology order. The film ends with a scene where the protagonist and his friends meet near a bridge as kids and have a lot of fun - they were innocents back then. This is the exact bridge where he commits suicide now. The film is set in historic events taking place in South Korea. The film is a character study of the protagonist, in the setting of South Korea - exploring how a man loses his innocence because of a series of events in his life and then finally ends up killing himself. This is an unconventional screenplay - it is like a cocktail of La Dolce Vita and Memento - but it's also a beautiful character study as well.

The film shows that the director has control over everything in the frame, the staging and the blocking is just beautiful. He takes his own time to get into a scene, he mostly uses off screen space to start a scene and slowly goes into a scene. This created a similar effect to his beautiful mystery film, Burning (2018). I like how he captures physical drama through wide shots and doesn't cut very often, whether it's a havoc in a place, or a fight scene, or a police slapping a suspect - he captures them in a way that it seems like it's happening right in front of us.  He uses sounds to create drama, for example, the first scene where he commits suicide is an exuberant scene. We see the visual of the train coming behind him, and him screaming and all of it coming together to a freeze frame. It's cinematic brilliance. He uses sounds of trains here and there, to remind us of the tragic event. This screenplay technique seems like a gimmick, but it's always interesting to see where the characters started from, when we see some esoteric, eccentric characters.