You're a hard-as-nails sea captain with a heart. The national economy is tanking, the fish aren't biting any more, your old boat is falling apart, and/or your own "luck has run out." You get an offer to ship some illegal immigrants in from mainland China, for good money. Of course there's only one thing you can do with an offer like that. And things, as they say, go downhill from there.
The title means "Sea Fog" according to the director, assuming I heard him right. It's based on a stage play, from a true story, which really shows. It's a richly-drawn world, it's like swimming around in a novel. Every character, every member of the crew, and a good number of the refugees, are memorable, identifiably different characters. And the plot goes on like a good novel. Stuff happens, more stuff happens, you don't know what's going to happen next, but in retrospect the characters choices are inevitable, they were forced to act the way they did because of who they are, in retrospect that person could not have made any other choice but that one. I mean some seriously taut writing going on here.
Best line: "Look, we're all in the same boat here. I mean really--this is a boat! And we're in it!"
I would have been completely lost and absorbed in the world of the film except for the incessant clicking sound going on behind me. Never figured out what it was or who it was coming from. Fuck.
The trailer:
First-time directory? Jeez, and it's hard enough filming on the ocean. But he doesn't waste a lot of time on long elegiac shots of the tiny boat floating across the enormous ocean--he's got too much to say. Really captures the small spaces, and the dirt, and the hardness of working on an old pile-of-junk fishing boat.
Some socio-political background: There are a bunch of ethnic Koreans living in China. They want to flee China to the freedom and prosperity of S.K. They speak Korean. They do however, speak Korean as a noticeable dialect. The actress, Han Ye-ri in the Q&A afterward said that the most difficult part of the film for here was learning that dialect. An aspect of the film that was not something that came out in the subtitles. Another language tidbit lost in translation: at one point she's talking to the youngest crewmember, who has the hots for her, and is bragging about his status on the ship. "Why are you talking down to me?" she asks, "How old are you?" I know that the Korean language is extremely sensitive to status, I know that from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers where he talks about Korean Airlines crashes where the crewmembers were too deferential to communicate clearly that the plane was about to crash. So the boy was taking a high-status language position to the girl, which she didn't feel he deserved, and he was forced to transparently lie about his age to back himself up.
True story, out of 60 refugees, 30 died. Aftermath: A change in the law by the Korean assembly allowed ethnic Korean Chinese who managed to reach South Korea to stay in the country instead of being automatically deported.
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