Breaking the Convention?

The film "The Good, The Bad, and The Weird" is fascinating to watch because it is simply different from the other films that we had screened previously. The film much more resembles with the old western cowboy movie than the conventional Korean films that are set in the Japanese colonial period. The film instantly drew me to a question: why did the director produce the film as different as other Korean films set in the colonial period? I am going to mainly focus on the film setting and stylistic devices so to look at what breaks the convention.

I think the film director perhaps wanted to break the conventional image of the Japanese colonial Korea or Korean people. If we remember the films that had been screened in previous weeks, the locations are usually set in Japan or Korea. Those movies depict the people either Japanese or Koreans as well. For example, while the Japanese women wear kimonos and the Korean women wear hanboks (Korean traditional clothes) as shown in Radio Dayz.

On the other hand, the film location for "the Good, the Bad and the Weird", is set in the desert at Manchuria which is unusual for Korean films that are set in the colonial period. The location instantly gave me an exotic impression that is quite distant from the conventional image of the Japanese colonial period. It also gave me a cosmopolitan feeling as the film captures African or Caucasians or whomever neither Korean nor Japanese. The Characters never wear hanbok at all; especially, the three characters give the audience the impression of western cowboys or travelers. A lot of Korean films that are set in the Japanese colonial periods, I think they focus on the dichotomy of the Korean and Japanese cultural aspects as if they were only two nations during the colonial period. Furthermore, because of the discourse that Koreans criticize the Japanese exclusive domination of Korea as negative one, the Korean culture tends to make Japanese look bad or depict as if they are villains in many cultural contents such as contemporary soap operas and movies. However, in the film "the Good, the Bad and the Weird", the director dispersed lots of different interests such as nationalistic interests, Japanese imperial interests, pro-Japanese collaborators’ interests or personal wealth-gaining interests. All these interests are aligned to focus on the map that directs to the Qing dynasty’s secret vault. In the film, anybody is neither extremely good nor extremely evil. At the end of the film, the Japanese soldiers are depicted very unwise and naive. By aligning all of the characters’ interests, the film breaks the convention of the dichotomy of Japanese and Korean that is usually depicted in other Korean films that are set in the Japanese colonial period.