Nowhere to Hide
By Steve Erickson
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Nowhere to Hide, a South Korean film opening this weekend at the Music Box, takes the strategy further than anything I’ve seen recently, mapping the intersections between action cinema and the avant-garde. Writer-director Lee Myung-Se draws on obvious sources like Dirty Harry and John Woo, while his postmodern imagery digests the vocabulary of silent cinema, animation, avant-garde film, and music video (most of the action is set to pounding techno and heavy metal). His pacing is masterful, the numerous fights and chases are enthralling, and the cinematography, by Jeong Kwang-Soek and Song Haeng-Ki, is consistently beautiful, a lush tone poem about the texture of light, rain, and snow. Unfortunately the film derives much of its power from the childlike thrill of beating the shit out of our enemies. If Nowhere to Hide were easier to dismiss as art, it wouldn’t be nearly as troubling.
I’ve seen two other films by Lee–First Love (1993), about a college student’s crush on an older theater director, and My Love, My Bride (1990), about a writer’s troubled marriage. He’s hardly a conventional narrative filmmaker: in First Love he depicts a dinner scene through still photos and silhouettes and, for no apparent reason, shows a girl brushing her teeth in fast motion. To express the heroine’s moods he uses animation and poetry intertitles and allows her to speak directly to the audience. My Love, My Bride is more conventional, but its episodic structure is overtly inspired by comic books, its first few scenes jumping from the lovers’ awkward first date to their honeymoon. In Nowhere to Hide the quicksilver action is often interrupted by brief bursts of slow motion, total stillness, or even drawings of the characters. Yet Lee seems less interested in developing those characters than in mining the genre (be it romance, comedy, or action) for visual material. He treats his characters with bemused affection, which may be relatively benign in the earlier films but becomes morally dubious when applied to the brain-dead bullies of Nowhere to Hide.
