Kang
Je-Gyu, writer-producer-director of the Korean film Shiri
has entered the North American film market with the biggest
splash of any Korean film to date. After making box office
records in South Korea and receiving acclaim in Hong Kong
and Japan, Shiri's success on a budget of a
mere $5 million has served to revitalize the Korean film industry,
which eagerly awaits the planned sequel. The film's title
refers to the shiri, a fish indigenous to Korea that
swims upstream to spawn, which Kang has made a symbol of the
Korean longing for reunification. The film is premised on
the conflict between North Korea and South Korea, beginning
with titles that indict the North for starting war in 1950
and implicate a certain fictional North Korean female named
Hee in several terrorist plots from 1992. When the film begins,
in 1998, Seoul is preparing for the first ever soccer match
in which a team from the North will play a counterpart from
the South. The early focus is on South Korean security personnel,
notably Ryu (played by Han Suk-Gyu) and Lee (played by Song
Kang-Ho), who are partners. Ryu, in addition, is carrying
on a serious romance with Hyun (played by Kim Yun-Jin), and
they plan to get married very soon. Hyun runs a store that
sells tropical fish, adjacent to an apartment which she shares
with Ryu. Soon, a daring raid by a renegade group of North
Korean commandos from the soccer team succeeds in acquiring
a special chemical that can produce a giant explosion when
heated for ten minutes, so security personnel are on the alert
to apprehend the culprits and to retrieve the explosive, especially
after a shopping mall is destroyed. Next, the North Korean
group demands millions and a jet plane ready for their escape.
Ryu puts clues together from his pursuit of the culprits,
including the realization that his girlfriend Hyun is really
Hee, and heads for the soccer stadium, which he is certain
is the intended target of the next blast. Sure enough, the
terrorists have turned on certain lights that will heat the
chemical. Ryu locates them in a control room and tries to
dissuade them from carrying out the plan. Park (played by
Choi Min-Sik), the head of the terrorist squad, explains that
the plan is to cause an explosion that will kill the principal
obstacles to Korean reunification, namely, the heads of both
governments, while they are presiding over the soccer match.
Having done so, war will break out, and he hopes that Korea
will then be united, so that the North will no longer be consigned
to poverty and starvation. Despite the clumsy explanation
of the motives of the fictional terrorists of the North, Shiri
has achieved a cinematic breakthrough by attempting to portray
North Koreans in a sympathetic light, the first film to do
so without fear that the filmmaker will be jailed. Unsurprisingly,
the plot is foiled in the end. Hee and Park both die, leaving
Ryu sentimental about the love of his life that has been lost.
Thus, Shiri combines politics with romance in
a high-energy action film with considerable violence, a challenge
of sorts to Hollywood to make films that appeal to so many
diverse tastes. MH
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