When I saw the name of the series coming up at Film at Lincoln Center — “Relentless Invention: New Korean Cinema, 1996-2003” — I thought that it would probably include the greatest unknown movie of the century so far. Sure enough, it does.
All right, let’s stipulate that saying a movie is the “greatest unknown” this or the “most underrated” that is a problematic enterprise. Unknown by whom? Underrated compared to what?
So where do I get off singling out Lee Myung-se’s crime thriller “Nowhere to Hide,” which opened in New York 19 years ago?
To begin with, there’s a good circumstantial case. A hit at Sundance, the recipient of buoyant reviews (including one from Elvis Mitchell in The New York Times), “Nowhere to Hide” virtually disappeared after its opening. The screenings at Lincoln Center on Nov. 25 and 30 appear to be the film’s first in New York since a single showing at the Korean Cultural Center in 2004.
Lee’s own fade was nearly as quick. After “Nowhere to Hide” he had an unproductive American sojourn, which led to a six-year gap between pictures. His last feature — only his eighth — came out in 2007, when he was 50.
Lee is not a director concerned with making an audience comfortable. His movies are not obscure or difficult, and they mostly avoid the grimness and violence associated with the new wave of South Korean cinema. But they disregard expectation. (To say that they defy it would falsely imply that Lee gave any thought to it at all.) Whether he’s working in romantic comedy or horror or swordplay, Lee answers only to the visual and tonal ideas that interest him.
“Nowhere to Hide” — his only venture into the popular Korean genre of the gangster film — may be both his most singular and most accessible movie. It slips back and forth from high-octane chase to slow-motion slapstick ballet to noirish, rain-soaked romance, the way an old-fashioned Hollywood musical changes up song styles.
It’s open about its influences, serving them up omakase-style: the John Woo course, the Sam Peckinpah course, the Wong Kar-wai palate cleanser. (The closing scene is a twofer, saluting both Carol Reed and Robert Altman.) It’s a straightforward story about a cop’s grinding pursuit of a murderous mobster, and it’s simultaneously Lee’s demonstration that he can do anything he wants at any moment and not lose his audience.
And he wastes no time demonstrating it. “Nowhere to Hide” begins with two short, utterly contrasting, equally enthralling sequences that whipsaw you into happy submission. The black-and-white opening introduces the two cop heroes, Woo (Park Joong-hoon) and Kim (Jang Dong-gun), in roiling, syncopated action that has the looks and rhythms of comic books and 1990s music videos.
Then, four minutes in, Lee changes everything. Depicting the killing that sets the plot in motion, he empties the screen, focusing on a Busan landmark, a steep urban staircase down which a lone schoolgirl hops. Rock music gives way to the plaintive Bee Gees ballad “Holiday” and the pace slows accordingly. Around the gray stairs is a wash of brilliant, almost painfully saturated color, dominated by a blanket of yellow autumn leaves. The percussive, pulpy violence of the opening is replaced by a close-up of a single blade flashing down and a bright streak of blood across a face. In a fleeting visual coup, black-suited gangsters appear on the stairs, clambering up from the bottom of the frame like two-dimensional figures in a brush painting.
And then boom, we’re in yet another movie, though this time it’s the one Lee more or less sticks with. Woo, who wears his cockiness like a uniform, walks into a noodle shop and throws some attitude at another customer. “Think this is a cops-and-robbers movie?” the weary proprietor asks at the very moment that “Nowhere to Hide” becomes a cops-and-robbers movie. The other customer, who happens to be the killer, disappears out the back of the shop.
At this point, the plot kicks in, and Woo, Kim and their team of latter-day Keystone Kops spend the balance of the film — 72 ever more frustrating days, in movie time — pursuing the gangster, Chang (Ahn Sung-ki). Chases, interrogations, stakeouts and near-misses bring them steadily, incrementally closer to the inevitable showdown.
Lee’s virtuosity never flags, and it also never gets wearying. Every idea seems to come along in the right place, at the right moment — a nighttime fight that morphs into a shadow play, with the combatants’ flat black images flowing across a white wall like Balinese puppets; a rolling, slow-motion, freeze-framed melee that anticipates a signature scene four years later in Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy”; a dusty road trip ending in a barbershop standoff straight out of a western (either Hollywood or Hong Kong).
If you can negotiate the shifting tones and rhythms, Lee’s guerrilla-like inventiveness will keep a nearly constant smile on your face. That “Nowhere to Hide” isn’t quite like any other cop-and-gangster movie explains why you probably haven’t seen it. Once you have, the genre will never feel quite the same.
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