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Quiet Rage

Had a chance to watch Lee Chang-dong's Burning recently. I have not read either of the two source stories the movie uses - one by Faulkner and the other by Muraki, so I came to the experience without any bias or expectation. Each of the three main characters draw the viewer in. They get you to think about their inner lives as their interactions with each other play out on the screen. There could have been a way for this to feel unsatisfactory but the Chang-dong makes it work beautifully. 

He shows us the world as the protagonist's neurotic eye sees it specially after the woman disappears. The woman herself is a great study in what it means to seek class mobility while being a woman with very few options. The chaos of her tiny apartment which she shares with an authorized cat mirrors the precariousness of her existence. She has to live in a pretend world for the most part for her dreams to come true. 

While she and Jongshu share the same background she is not shown angry about how her life has turned out - he is. The rage is there bubbling beneath the surface, almost unable to manifest itself until the end. The rich man burns ugly, dilapidated greenhouses almost as a way to obliterate the ugly signs of poverty. We don't ever see him in the act but neither do we see him killing any women - these are just things within the realm of possibility. The last scene with the burning Porsche completes the arc. 

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