- Source: Webtoon Hilarious Bullying
- Actors: Lee Byung Hun, Park Seo Joon, Park Bo Young, Kim Sun Young, etc.
- Director : Taehwa Eom
- Running time: 130 minutes
Recently, I’ve been able to afford to go to the movies with my wife every once in a while, as my son has gotten used to playing without his mom and dad at his grandmother’s house nearby. She’s been a movie buff since before we got married, so she’s seen almost every movie that comes out, and I tend to watch the big ones, so we often have late-night movie dates, but I haven’t been able to go to the theater for a while, so it’s nice to get back into the swing of things.
The last movie I saw was Concrete Utopia. I haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet, and there are also movies called Tentpole, so I was worried about which one to choose, but I chose Concrete Utopia, which has a pretty high rating.
I’m going to skip over the story, since it’s been a while since the movie came out, and I’m not usually one to ramble on and on about my style. Instead, I’m going to go through a few keywords and food for thought, which will contain spoilers, so if you’ve seen the movie, I hope you’ll see this as a way to give you a little more commentary.
A zoomed-in world
Concrete Utopia is a movie that zooms in deep, cutting out context. As a book, it zooms in on the highlights without building up the narrative.
Often, disaster movies explain the context and reasons for the disaster, or deal with humanism in the face of disaster, because people like to find humanity in the midst of destruction, or see heroic characters overcome it.
However, the movie doesn’t explain why the disaster has struck – it’s just set in an imperial palace apartment that is suddenly hit by a major earthquake and left alone in the middle of it. The movie throws in place names like “Seoul Station,” but omits all the usual explanations like what happened to the government, what happened to the military, what the situation is like outside of Seoul, and why no relief is coming from abroad.
In theory, the aftermath of an earthquake, no matter how large, is hardly a city or even a country, so there should be some kind of outside help, but the movie abandons that typical formula. Just as the theater maximizes the “disconnected” experience, Concrete Utopia focuses all eyes and attention on the imperial apartments and their surroundings.
Others, residents, and the gap
In the beginning of the movie, they coexist with the people who have flocked to their neighborhood. However, food is limited and the space can’t accommodate many humans. When the apartment is taken over by strangers, a former resident is stabbed, and a fire breaks out. Geum-ae (Kim Sun-young), the vice president of the association, calls a residents’ meeting to kick the outsiders out of the apartment.
During this process, Byeong Hun-bun (Dramaturg) is elected as the temporary representative of the apartment, As the first rule of the apartment, the statement that“The apartment belongs to the residents, and only the residents can live in it”is created. At the end of the meeting, they decide to throw the non-residents out of the apartment, and most of them freeze to death. The movie takes place in the winter in Seoul, where it’s minus 20 degrees Celsius or below, and when there’s no electricity and nowhere to shelter, you have no choice but to verbally kill yourself.
InitiallyThese people, who are referred to as outsiders in the film, begin to be referred to as “cockroaches” as the movie progresses. The idea is to thoroughly separate the inhabitants of the apartment complex from those outside it, to otherize the outsiders, and in the process, they constantly experience the insanity of being chosen, the hostility toward outsiders, and the cementing of internal cohesion that comes with it.
Through the distinction between apartments and non-apartments, the film explores the consolidation of collective selfishness (or survivalism), and the conflicts and dissolution therein, in a running time of 130 minutes. “I wanted the selfishness and evil of ordinary people to be understood and pitied,” said director Uhm Tae-hwa.
Follow or leave
Movies constantly ask questions. What would you do? When the government and everything else has fallen apart, the only thing that gives you a chance of survival is strong leadership. Creating internal cohesion by imagining an external enemy is the foundation of politics.
That’s why many viewers are emotionally repulsed by Young-tak (Lee Byung-heon), but also root for him when the entire apartment complex is attacked by outsiders. The movie constantly treads that delicate line.
The Imperial Palace Apartments is a strange system. The communist system of rationing and the capitalist system of pay-as-you-go coexist, and other residents who secretly harbor outsiders are monitored and hunted down. Just like the situation during the Holocaust, many are forced to choose between their own survival and coexistence with others.
This is an example of the banality of evil, where things that everyone takes for granted and does normally can become evil in extreme situations. Of course, the director doesn’t have the right answer, and it’s hard to say that the people in the imperial apartments were ‘wrong’ because history is only written by those who judge after the fact.
The villagers who secretly hid the people are forgiven because they are villagers too, but the conclusion that they all have to kneel in front of everyone and apologize is a weird sort of people’s court, but it also gives them a “take it or leave it” situation. It’s a different look than the Holocaust, but I think it shows the normalcy of various evils.
A strange mix of camaraderie and selfishness
As the movie progresses, People are relieved to see the rules and order of the imperial apartments slowly being established. When they go outside their apartments to forage for food and find it, there’s a sense of “thank goodness” and weak camaraderie takes hold. And just as they’re opening the groceries, the director sneaks in again with a question: “What are you doing?
Objectively speaking, the people of the Imperial Palace Apartments are a mob and property trespassers, holding a child hostage and pointing guns to protect their food. However, they dare to attack the grocery store owner and rob him of his food in the name of ‘taking a child hostage’ and ‘saving our OOO’. And the camera lingers on the grocery store owner’s wife and daughter, who are crying while holding on to their pretenses.
Shiver. I wonder if it feels like you’ve saved an ally, but you’ve done so at the expense of killing civilians. And, to put it another way, how is robbing a well-stocked grocery store to make ends meet any different than any other outsider attacking the palace apartments to survive the cold? Isn’t Rapo’s relationship with the palace apartment residents (or Park Seo-joon’s dubiously well-intentioned character), which the audience has built up to be nothing more than Stockholm Syndrome?
A world turned upside down, an apartment utopia
The beginning of the movie is like a docu-film about the history of apartments in Korea. As I watch it, I can’t help but think of our own lives right now, hanging from our apartments. In the movie, the apartment is a place of survival, a symbol of class, a community, a whole world, and the imperial palace apartment, which we zoom right in on, is a slice of that apartment republic, and it’s unfiltered.”
It’s a tongue-in-cheek look at the absurdity of social status being determined by what floor of an apartment you live on. One resident who was evicted early on and then reclaimed his home says, “I moved in three months ago, and it took my wife and I 23 years to get over that bridge, and they don’t treat us like people. They don’t let us come in on a regular basis, and they don’t treat us like people because it’s a school district or something.” He’s referring to the collapsed Palace Apartments right next door.
Even the child and his mother (or grandmother) who come to the home of the main characters, Myung-hwa (Park Bo-young) and Min-sung (Park Seo-joon), are shown to be residents of the palace apartment, wearing mink coats. We naturally can’t help but think of the many apartment egotisms that have made the news, and we are confronted with this symbol of classed apartment Korean desire, as well as the resident’s meeting where they have to decide whether the house belongs to them or their tenants.
So it is with the festivities at the imperial apartments for the New Year. Celebration in a world where everything has fallen apart is bizarre and foreign. The camera casts the shadows of drinking and dancing people in the apartment, asking what toasting in a broken world means, and Lee Byung-heon-bun sings a song. It is Yoon Soo-il’s <Apartment> that seems to vomit.
“아무도 없는, 아무도 없는 쓸쓸한 너의 아파트”
우리에게 아파트는 유토피아일까?
What is a leader?
The ending makes you think that Park Bo-young-bun (Myung-hwa) is the main character, but that’s not the weight of the movie. It’s Lee Byung-heon-bun (Kim Young-tak) who carries the movie, and the majority of the 130 minutes is a thriller about his true nature, his mask, and what’s true and what’s false.
Any character is multifaceted, and good and evil characters are often three-dimensional.”. Yung Tak’s character is, in Greek mythological terms, a madness with a tragedy. A character who doesn’t belong to the apartment himself, but at the same time, throws everything away for it. A character who has been scammed, murdered, and then deceived himself. A character whose plight is more sympathetic than mysterious.
Maybe we’re going to hell in a handbasket, and we have to clear that hell, I wonder if this is the kind of person who would be best suited to be our leader.
Whether it’s Park Bo Young Boon (Myung Hwa) at the opposite end of the spectrum or Kim Do Yoon Boon (Do Kyun) who chooses to commit suicide, blaming everyone for his trampled good intentions, he has a cause, but he doesn’t have the power to enforce it. Democracy is just a train running towards evil if the majority has an evil heart.
What if is a road not taken in reality, but perhaps if the initial referendum had resulted in the decision to allow outsiders to live with them, Kim Young-tak would have done his best to survive the selfish community of the apartment as best he could in a different reality.
Like Richard Dawkinson’s book Selfish Gene, I wonder if we are survival machines and it is okay to sacrifice everything for the survival of the community as an individual or an enlarged individual. Or, like Park Seo-joon in the film, I would have conformed to a certain extent and tried to maximize my own interests within the system. I think many people in the theater had similar thoughts and concerns.
The final ending shows the residents of the Hwanggung Apartment in Seoul Station living a life they didn’t choose. They are surviving by their own choices and methods, but I don’t think the director is giving the message that ‘there were other ways’. If they had a decent shelter, if they had an apartment that didn’t collapse (a vested interest), they might have done anything to protect it.
Concrete Universe
I had a feeling that the movie ended on an unsatisfactory note, but there must have been a bigger picture. After the movie, I looked up and found that several works based on the original work of Kim Ssung-nyung are being adapted into movies or OTT. Of course, there is no connection between the works, but I’m looking forward to it because it tells a universal story.
While watching the movie, I was reminded of Samaragu’s ‘City of the Blind’ and other series, because this concrete utopia reminded me of questions about humanity. I don’t know if I want to watch it again, because it’s a movie that touches my discomfort. But that’s why I would say it’s a good movie and a movie to think about.
[Concrete Universe]
Movie Contopia
The Ransom of Tibbing (Director Min Yong-geun)
Movie Concrete Utopia – A Pleasant Neighborhood
Concrete Market (Director Hong Ki-won)
Movie Wilderness (director Heo Myung-haeng)
