Calista's latest effort, Summer '77, is a love story wrapped inside a mystery. Set in South Korea, the movie follows Song Ji-woo, a middle-aged teacher at a rural high school, as he searches for his missing daughter Soo-ji. Intermittently the movie jumps back in time to portray Song's romance with Soo-ji's mother, Jae-eun, which took place against the backdrop of the Korean War.
The movie deploys classic noir tropes, but it is not a playful pastiche. Soo-ji suffers from schizophrenia and Song suspects that she has fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous man she met at college in Busan. But Song's only evidence for this is a letter Soo-ji wrote before she disappeared, and as Song follows clues and interviews her friends and acquaintances, he comes to realize that reality is more complicated. Song doggedly follows up any hint he can find, however hopeless, sweating in the omnipresent heat of the Busan summer. (The weather is almost another character in the film, mentioned by everyone and visible in nearly every scene. From time to time the humidity boils up into violent thunderstorms that bring only temporary relief. Calista realizes the itchy, sweaty atmosphere so convincingly that the movie is almost physically uncomfortable to watch.)
In flashback scenes, Song is no less determined and monomaniacal in his pursuit of Jae-eun. The setting is the same—in the hot summer of 1950, both Song and Jae-eun have fled behind the Pusan Perimeter, the last desperate U.N. holdout against the invading Communists. Jae-eun seems likely to marry her suitor Park Chang-ho, who helped her and her parents flee to safety at considerable risk to himself. Park's heroism makes a persuasive case, but Song desperately begs Jae-eun to choose him instead. Eventually he succeeds, at some cost to his dignity, and in the shambles of war he and Jae-eun start a family.
Back in the 1970s, Song finally finds his daughter with the help of the man he had suspected of abducting her. Tomorrow Song will take Soo-ji back to the rural town where he lives, where Jae-eun is buried. He couldn't rescue Jae-eun's family from the invading Communists, he couldn't save her from cancer, and he knows the storms in Soo-ji's head will never go away. But tonight in Busan he has hired an air-conditioned hotel room he can't afford, and he and Soo-ji are out of the feverish heat. While she sleeps he strokes her back and remembers.
Sunday, June 9, 2019
Sarang's Low Background
Sarang's latest effort, Low Background, is surprisingly subdued, a pleasant, low-key diversion from present events. The novel is set in a small town in eastern Tennessee in the early 1990s, and it opens with a calamity—a flood has washed out a large bridge spanning the adjacent river. Luckily no one was hurt, but the bridge will take a long time to replace, and until then residents will have to drive several miles to the next river crossing.
As if that weren't enough, the mayor is soon at loggerheads with representatives of the county and the state over who will pay for the replacement. The problem is that although the bridge was built by the federal government, its ownership (and responsibility for its maintenance) was transferred to the state shortly thereafter. But the state apparently transferred the bridge to the town in the 1950s without fanfare (and without much in the way of documentary evidence). Maintenance costs have traditionally been shared equally between the town and the county, but this arrangement was never formalized (or if it was, the town's beleaguered attorney can't find any evidence of it). Now the state and the county are determined to avoid any financial responsibility for the bridge's replacement. The mayor, on the advice of the town attorney, decides to surrender. The expense will be crushing.
But before the documents are signed, a chance remark by the mayor's daughter sets the story on a new course. In her college physics course she learned that the detonation of atomic bombs starting in 1945 dramatically increased the "background radiation" in the atmosphere, so that steel made after 1945 is contaminated with trace amounts of radioactive material. As a result modern steel emits an elevated amount of radiation—not enough to matter for most purposes, but unacceptably high for delicate instruments such as medical imaging machines and Geiger counters. Manufacturers of those instruments have to pay a premium for "low background" steel, made before the contamination of the atmosphere. The ruined bridge was a cantilever bridge made in the 1930s, so it will be an excellent source of low background steel.
Now the tables are turned. Unfortunately before the documents are signed the hapless town attorney tips his hand, and the state and county immediately change their positions. The state argues that the bridge was never properly transferred to the town and still belongs solely to the state, while the county argues that by sharing maintenance expenses the parties established a "course of conduct" that gives it a one-half ownership stake in the bridge. I won't spoil the conclusion, but needless to say the town is at least spared the cost of replacement.
Low Background is not a long book or a particularly dramatic one. What is distinctive about it is precisely its calm, deliberate, one-damn-thing-after-another plotting, which feels true to life in a way that busier, more elaborate plots often fail to achieve. It captures the tedium of life without becoming tedious. I suppose that's another way to read the title, as an invocation of a calmer time, an elegy for a life of low stakes punctuated by infrequent bursts of energy, before technology made it impossible to be detached from day-to-day microbursts of outrage and nonsense. A way of life that can no longer be sustained, but still something to seek out in its restful graveyards of steel.
As if that weren't enough, the mayor is soon at loggerheads with representatives of the county and the state over who will pay for the replacement. The problem is that although the bridge was built by the federal government, its ownership (and responsibility for its maintenance) was transferred to the state shortly thereafter. But the state apparently transferred the bridge to the town in the 1950s without fanfare (and without much in the way of documentary evidence). Maintenance costs have traditionally been shared equally between the town and the county, but this arrangement was never formalized (or if it was, the town's beleaguered attorney can't find any evidence of it). Now the state and the county are determined to avoid any financial responsibility for the bridge's replacement. The mayor, on the advice of the town attorney, decides to surrender. The expense will be crushing.
But before the documents are signed, a chance remark by the mayor's daughter sets the story on a new course. In her college physics course she learned that the detonation of atomic bombs starting in 1945 dramatically increased the "background radiation" in the atmosphere, so that steel made after 1945 is contaminated with trace amounts of radioactive material. As a result modern steel emits an elevated amount of radiation—not enough to matter for most purposes, but unacceptably high for delicate instruments such as medical imaging machines and Geiger counters. Manufacturers of those instruments have to pay a premium for "low background" steel, made before the contamination of the atmosphere. The ruined bridge was a cantilever bridge made in the 1930s, so it will be an excellent source of low background steel.
Now the tables are turned. Unfortunately before the documents are signed the hapless town attorney tips his hand, and the state and county immediately change their positions. The state argues that the bridge was never properly transferred to the town and still belongs solely to the state, while the county argues that by sharing maintenance expenses the parties established a "course of conduct" that gives it a one-half ownership stake in the bridge. I won't spoil the conclusion, but needless to say the town is at least spared the cost of replacement.
Low Background is not a long book or a particularly dramatic one. What is distinctive about it is precisely its calm, deliberate, one-damn-thing-after-another plotting, which feels true to life in a way that busier, more elaborate plots often fail to achieve. It captures the tedium of life without becoming tedious. I suppose that's another way to read the title, as an invocation of a calmer time, an elegy for a life of low stakes punctuated by infrequent bursts of energy, before technology made it impossible to be detached from day-to-day microbursts of outrage and nonsense. A way of life that can no longer be sustained, but still something to seek out in its restful graveyards of steel.
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