Yang Mal-bok, who delivered one of the highly effective Korean indie movie performances of latest reminiscence in The House with Two Ladies, is again in the indie realm with the rural-set queer drama Manok, the Korean Incredible Viewers Award winner at this yr’s Bucheon Worldwide Incredible Movie Pageant (BiFan).
She performs the titular Manok, a fiery middle-aged lesbian who runs what was once a preferred homosexual bar in Seoul. Nonetheless, her cantankerous angle has alienated her from the incoming era of queer activists.
Relatively than mend any broken relationships and face her issues head-on, Manok decides to run away from them following the demise of her estranged mom, returning to Iban-ri, the small village she grew up in, which she left years earlier. Now she is compelled to face the issues of her previous, together with her vitriolic ex-husband, who serves because the loudmouth village chief.
Whereas coming back from the large metropolis to the countryside is likely to be humiliating underneath any circumstances, for Manok, it’s much more sophisticated. Whereas loud and proud again in Seoul, she by no means got here out of the closet in Iban-ri and to today, individuals there are nonetheless clueless about her sexual orientation. All save for one kindred spirit, her ex-husband’s tomboyish daughter, who begins wanting as much as Manok, who in flip good points the braveness to as soon as extra change into the firebrand that she as soon as was, when she throws her hat into the following village chief election.
Cleanly and brightly directed by Lee Yu-jin, Manok is a well-meaning and infrequently amusing affair that empathises with Korea’s ever-embattled queer neighborhood and highlights the bigotry that perpetually hounds it. Not like the vast majority of Korea’s queer cinema, which focuses on youthful protagonists, Lee’s movie gives the refreshing perspective of an older homosexual era, battle-hardened by many years of bigotry in Korea’s extremely conservative social local weather.
Manok is a bitter and jaded character, and Yang performs her as somebody whose years of expertise have sharpened her wits however weathers her ardour to deploy them in the precise route, till she returns to Iban-ri. Yang is a delight to observe, as are quite a few her co-stars, together with a splendidly vile Park Wan-kyu as her blustery ex-husband.
But for all its good intentions, the story can also be a simplistic one. This can be a charming celebration about coming collectively to rejoice our variations, however the wishful pondering that dominates the victories of the climax causes the movie to wind down on a naive word, relatively than the celebratory one we would have hoped for.
