RYOO SEUNG-WAN

Biography

Ryoo Seung-wan (born in 1973) can be considered the Korean Tarantino: an inveterate cinephile, he debuted with Die Bad (2000), in which he brought together four highly appreciated episodes of similar subject matter (and in which his brother Ryoo Seung-beom, one of the most talented Korean actors of today, is also present). Since then, Ryoo has built a solid reputation as a director capable of bringing great energy and creativity to action and genre cinema. His films have been presented at Cannes (Crying Fist), Venice (The City of Violence) and Berlin (The Unjust).

Born in 1973, Ryoo Seung-wan has been fascinated by Hong Kong action films since he was a child. In high school he skipped lunch for a whole year, saving money to buy a used 8mm camera. Coming from a family of humble origins, he is not allowed to study cinema. Despite this, he participates in various courses and workshops to become a director, without ever abandoning his dream. In 1993 he turned to Park Chan-Wook, whom he deeply admired, and so, under Park's influence he began to become more and more passionate about B-movie movies, especially the horror of the 70s. He participated in the production of "Threesome" as a member of the staff of the directing department, then working on the horror film "Whispering Corridors", practicing more and more on the set. Making these films is more than an apprenticeship for him: he knows many people in the cinema, including Kang Hye-Jeong, producer and his current wife. His personal relationships helped him to make his first feature film, "Die Bad" (2000), an episodic film in the production of which many participated without receiving compensation, especially struck by Ryoo's great passion for his work. This small independent film, completed with few means but with great determination, is still considered today as a turning point in the recent history of the Korean film industry.
After completing "Dachimawa Lee", which pays homage to the Korean B-movies of the 60s and 70s, he prepares his first commercial film, "No Blood No Tears" (2002), bringing together some old glories of the past and building an exciting action film about the search for a bag containing money. Thanks to his next project "Arahan" (2004), his brother Ryoo Seung-Beom - who had already made a name for himself in "Die Bad" - became one of the most important emerging actors in Korean cinema. The film tells the story of a shy policeman who fights against evil, saving the world with the director putting realism aside and focusing on the funniest elements of the genre. On the contrary, "Crying Fist" (2005), presented at the Cannes Film Festival, goes beyond the boundaries of genre, exploring reality in a profound way; the cast includes Choi Min-Sik, one of the main Korean actors and once again Ryoo Seung-Beom; The film tells the existence of two men, their rise and their decline in the world of boxing. In 2006 he made "City of Violence" (presented at the Venice Film Festival), an action-movie with many noir elements and with countless references to recent Korean history and in which the director himself plays the hero, acting alongside Jung Doo-Hong, master of the Korean cloak and dagger. With his latest (higher-budget and highly successful) films "The Unjust" (2010), "The Berlin File" (2013) and "Veteran" (2015), Ryoo has been able to renew his style, which has become more mature and calibrated, also in function of a greater openness to a more international audience.

Critique

Director, screenwriter, actor, producer, talent scout, (incurable) cinephile. And the list could go on because Ryoo Seung-Wan's multifaceted talent seems to know no bounds. It is enough to evoke his name and the growing audience of his admirers (who recognize him as one of the most influential directors of contemporary Korean cinema) is ready to praise him, and not only because Ryoo has completely redefined the boundaries of a genre, the action film, which has always had a lion's share in the Korean industry, but also because his is also the story of a man who was able to follow an innate passion and transform it into a real life vocation. Many have written about the young boy of humble origins fascinated by Hong Kong action films who, thanks to his perseverance, managed to impose himself for three decades with a product, the so-called auteur blockbuster, which satisfied the tastes of the most hardened cinephiles as well as those of the general public. For some it is extraordinary creative intelligence, for others of ill-concealed cunning. Perhaps the truth lies in the middle, or rather, in the infamous esprit du temp (if ever there was one today) of which Ryoo has become a personal interpreter.
It is not so difficult to place the director within that New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague) that has made the Korean industry flourish again in the last fifteen years. In fact, many of the ideas that unite that generation of directors who brought Korea back among the great international cinemas can be found in his cinema, in particular that confrontation with the tradition of genres (and their contamination), which has never separated itself from a lucid look at the transformations of Korean society. Ryoo moves along this track, and although some of his films may appear to be pure and simple entertainment products, most of the time they hide a very palpable underlying disquiet. And this is probably the key to entering into his stories.
Seen from this perspective, Ryoo's cinema is certainly indebted, from the debut of "Die Bad" to at least "City of Violence", to that of his teacher and mentor Park Chan-Wook, for the bloody gloom, for the idea of violence as an ineluctable regulator of human relationships, for the fascination with which the cinephile quote is used. Although the destinies of the two have continued to intertwine over the years (they sign two of the five episodes that make up the collective film "If You Were Me", and Ryoo is an actor in two important Park films, "Mr. Vendetta" and "Lady Vendetta"), nevertheless Ryoo has from the beginning shown the desire to free himself from this cumbersome model, trying to find his own way that from a certain type of imagery was able to constitute itself in a style autonomous. And it was always starting from his own passions that Ryoo undertook this form of progressive demarcation: the pop culture of the 70s, from comics to genre films (action, cloak & dagger and horror) of Hong Kong, passing through the old B-series television series. It was by drawing heavily from this past - forcefully back in vogue thanks to the rediscovery that made it the postmodern global culture straddling the nineties and the new millennium - that Ryoo has been building that ironic and light-hearted approach that made him famous and that still constitutes the element that most distances him from Park.
Not so much in "Die Bad", a film still too immature, but still full of interesting ideas, but in the second feature film, "No Blood No Tears", that we understand how important it is for Ryoo to try to cut ties with Park, looking for his own way. Compared to the debut film, in which Park's influence is all too visible (the characters move on the margins of an obtusely "Darwinian" society, where the obligation of excellence and the myth of money dictate ferocious rules to a humanity that is increasingly lonely, vicious and devoid of any hope for the future and so feelings such as violence, oppression, revenge become the only tool to get out of a stagnant condition of existential torpor), the writing becomes more structured and shrewd (the bag trick is a beautiful "Soderbergh-like" intuition), but above all there is a strong acceleration towards those elements that from now on will constitute the stylistic features of Ryoo's style: the amazing action sequences and the countless moments of humor, always functional to dilute the tension and to arouse the curiosity of the general public, within a genre framework (the high-tension thriller), whose archetypal figures are continuously redefined in their own mythology. Testimony to this work on the character (in particular that of the policeman/detective, a bit of a hero and a bit of a rogue) are, for example, two films that are in some ways quite similar, such as "City of Violence" and "The Unjust", in which the protagonists act as authentic plot-drivers to immerse us in a rotten reality, made up of malpractice, corruption, double-crossing: a sort of social jungle in which you have to know how to play the game, trying to play your role to the end (with "City of Violence" Ryoo returns to look at Park).
However, we are still in a Ryoo film and therefore the proverbial irony with which the director looks at his "heroes" has the same expressive force as his infamous action scenes, which the Korean director is able to achieve with a sensitivity and spectacular wisdom almost unattainable in today's Korean (and perhaps Asian) cinema. Yet Ryoo does nothing but recover the tradition (very tight editing, continuous changes of points of view, physicality of the actors, special effects, music, etc.), albeit in a completely new guise, given precisely by the desire to show everything as pure artifice. This gaze, which reveals a very precise idea of cinema, tends to put Ryoo on the side of the viewer, who like him, is wonderfully amazed and fascinated by the cathartic force of cinema. It is mainly thanks to this that Ryoo's films are so popular with the general public, because the Korean director – unlike many of his colleagues – does nothing to disguise his love for the typical elements of entertainment. Not very snobbish and very fruitful attitude.
To act in a certain sense as extreme opposites in his filmography there are then two films, which could not be more different: "Arahan" (with "Dachimawa Lee" next to it, in its double version, medium and long) and "Crying Fist", just to reiterate, if it were needed, that ours loves to shuffle the cards and above all leave more doors open. The first is a pure divertissement, capable of going far beyond the limits of the simple cinephile tribute, and presenting itself as a colorful tribute to an indefinable pop-kitsch epic, capable of putting together the tradition of cloak & dagger (but the inspiration is that of an old Korean comic famous in the 70s), the suggestions of comedy and certain sorties of sci-fiction, as well as the infatuation with great Hollywood comics such as the Hulk or Spiderman. A kind of mix between Jackie Chan, Back to the Future and The Matrix, to be clear, beyond which Ryoo has not gone anymore, perhaps with good reason. On the other hand, however, "Crying Fist" presents itself as an "anomalous" film in the director's filmography, for that bath of healthy and palpable realism that critics liked very much, precisely because it was unexpected. On closer inspection, however, the story of these two boxers (one older, the other younger) is not so dissimilar from that of the other films, rather the difference lies in the fact that here the representation of Korean society emerges more strongly because the spectacular elements typical of its action-movies are reduced, in favor of a deliberately more sober mise-en-scène, but always well structured in a genre framework (the little-frequented box-movie). And it is also in this film that Ryoo does not spare himself in experimenting with new expressive solutions, with the camera moving in space with unprecedented sequence shots (the whole scene of the second round of the final match is exemplary in this sense), elements almost unknown in his style, which also allow him to enhance the rehearsals of the two leading actors (a great Choi Min-Sik and an equally convincing Ryoo Seung-Beom, brother of the director, to whose fame he has contributed in a decisive way). It is perhaps not far-fetched to hypothesize that "Crying Fist" is the film in which Ryoo tries to make the leap and that is to confront a cinema capable of creating short circuits between the psychological dimension of the characters and the narrative structure of the film (think of the films of great American authors such as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and Robert Aldrich).
The last three films by the Korean director, the aforementioned "The Unjust", "The Berlin File" and "Veteran", seem to be moving along this path, which have in common, in addition to the need - all too visible - to conquer a certain Western audience more and more, also a more structured attention to the characters and the dynamics that regulate their relationships. Perhaps it is the first ("The Unjust") to reveal this sort of new course of Ryoo's cinema: while retaining the typical elements of the thriller, it dilutes the action quite a bit (and for a Ryoo film it is truly surprising!), in favor of a cold and cruel realism, capable of contaminating every thought (and action) of the characters, stuck in a web of conventions from which it is practically impossible to escape. This path is also continued in "The Berlin File", which in spite of appearances (it looks like a Cold War spy-movie) demonstrates a marked originality: the action has a fast and dynamic pace, but also highly realistic, an element that dilates it in time and lightens it in terms of intensity. Of the three films, it is the last, "Veteran", the one most similar to Ryoo's best-known style, representing a sort of step backwards compared to what the Korean director had done in the two previous works. But it is the eternal game of content and frame, which, however, seen from this perspective, can only offer numerous variations, to be modeled and reshaped to one's liking. Yet another proof, probably, of what Ryoo himself once said, namely that "films come before genres".