Burning Would Have Won
One of the most memorable scenes in a movie last year can be found in a blink-and-you’ll-miss moment in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. A young woman named Haemi (Jun Jong-seo), back from her travels in Africa, demonstrates the native “dance of Great Hunger”—which involves a lot of arm flailing—to a group of rich people she barely knows. They’re friends of Ben (Steven Yeun), a man she met on her trip: a charming, well-off Seoulite who’s subtly menacing. He also becomes a romantic obstacle for her friend Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in), also present, who’s pining for Haemi. While Haemi is dancing at the bar, with everyone awkwardly, unenthusiastically clapping along, Jongsu catches Ben mid-yawn, before he quickly turns it into a bashful smile. It’s a subtle switch that happens in Ben’s fascination with Haemi, a switch that later on informs a sinister subtext. Burning is a film that raises more questions than it answers, a slow-simmer thriller about warring masculinities that landed South Korea its very first spot on the Academy Awards shortlist—the only time in 57 years and 30 submissions that the country has gotten so far in the Oscars race.
Burning has had, by all accounts, a successful year, starting with the record-high jury score of 3.8 at Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered. It continued to garner critical acclaim, and by the end of the year, Steven Yeun was honored as Best Supporting Actor at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards. (Not that that’s a direct indication of an Oscar nod for the film.) Yeun’s chances were a slim shot from the get-go, despite his being a clear front-runner for the category—his performance lacked the showiness of more Oscar-acknowledged roles (he didn’t eat a raw bison liver on a mountainside, for example). But the omission of Burning from the Oscars, especially as a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, is still perplexing, if not exactly a surprise.
The first time I felt like Korean films actually had a chance at touching the golden statue was 2016. Early festival buzz started generating for Park Chan-wook’s salacious queer thriller, The Handmaiden. There was also Na Hong-jin’s supernatural horror, The Wailing, about a mysterious illness that infects the population of a small rural village. Both were ambitious, epic projects from technical masters. Instead, by late summer that year, Korea submitted the stuffy period piece The Age of Shadows, perhaps thinking this Japanese-occupation thriller was “safe” for the even stuffier Academy crowd who prefer war dramas, or perhaps thinking its distribution from American studio Warner Bros. would make it a more favorable and accessible pick. Though as adequate of a movie as many others that have graced the nominations list, The Age of Shadows made virtually no noise and, unsurprisingly, was not nominated for the 2017 Academy Awards.
At the time, the submission of Age of Shadows made no sense to me. But in early 2017, a government blacklist created by Korea’s former, impeached president Park Geun-hye was uncovered. Thousands of Korean artists and cultural figures were banned from receiving government support, and one of the most prominent figures on that blacklist was The Handmaiden director Park Chan-wook, thought to be too leftist and thus a threat to the government’s agenda.
Lack of homeland support also likely ruined Oscar chances for Okja, about a young girl’s rescue mission to save her fantastical animal friend from evil corporate hands, even though its director, Bong Joon-ho, arguably has the most commercial appeal Stateside and the cast includes Hollywood A-listers like Jake Gyllenhaal and Tilda Swinton. But after 93 percent of Korean theaters refused to show Bong’s animal-liberation thriller due to its same-day Netflix release, Okja was doomed. So instead, A Taxi Driver was submitted (another fine movie that didn’t move any needles).
Then came Burning, which felt like the exact right choice after years of miscalculation. And then, just like that, for the first time since the 35th Academy Awards in 1962, a South Korean film was shortlisted. I, like many others, thought this could be it. But Burning already had a few strikes against it. Though it’s a standout from a notable independent-film distributor, Well Go USA Entertainment, it’s unlikely the company had the funds necessary to pull off a big Oscar campaign like some other studios (imagine the money Netflix shelled out for Roma, for example). Burning, despite its brilliance in subtext, language, and performances, also occupies a strange cultural gray space between the East and the West, one that perhaps Academy voters had a hard time connecting with.
Then there are voters themselves. Even though the voting pool may have recently expanded to include more women and people of color, the actual group that nominates films for special categories is still mostly white, male, and old, and their taste continues to skew European and wartime (Cold War is a perfect example), or European-esque (as is the case with Alfonso Cuarón, whose stories come from a place of privilege; Roma is no exception).
Asian films have historically been erased by the Academy, and despite some groundbreaking changes to the Oscars, like Black Panther’s Best Picture nom, some things, such as the Foreign Language category, remain rigid. In fact, the only time more than one Asian film has even been nominated was in 1993, when Vietnam’s The Scent of Green Papaya and Taiwan’s The Wedding Banquet both competed—but neither won. If the Academy was only going to let in one Asian movie this year, it was going to be Hirokazu Koreeda’s Palme d’Or–winning Shoplifters, which indeed has made the cut. Though Korea did not, a representative from Well Go told me, “Our hope is that new audiences are encouraged to discover both this beautiful film as well as the literal catalog of masterworks from both South Korea and Director Lee.”
The continued neglect of Korean cinema feels incongruous, given the country’s rapid influence on pop culture in the United States. K-pop has gone global, and American media is starting to adapt popular Korean franchises, such as the newly viral hit The Masked Singer (borrowed from Korea’s The King of Mask Singer) or the impending remake of Train to Busan, the claustrophobic zombie thriller that broke box-office records in Korea.
Burning director Lee Chang-dong has been creating beautiful, difficult art films about trauma for the past 20 years—it’s no surprise this is the third submission from his homeland. His latest was well-deserving of a nomination, for a country long due for Academy acknowledgment. While it is the most American, and possibly the most accessible, of Lee’s films, there is so much subtlety with language that may be hard to pick up as a foreign viewer, or so much subtext to be mined from enigmatic performances (as in the case of a casual yawn at a bar gathering). The multicultural straddling of the film—between its uniquely Korean setting and the Western aspirations of its characters—also puts Burning in a gray area. It’s that gray area that makes Burning such a fascinating watch, and perhaps a hindrance when it comes to these particular awards.
