Instead, Lee concentrates his film on the extreme class inequality in South Korea, underscoring the economic desperation that destroys families, ravages homes, and consumes dispossessed individuals.īurning takes its basic plot line of boy-meets-and-loses-girl from Haruki Murakami’s 1992 short story “ Barn Burning.” In both the film and the original story, the male protagonist loses a love interest from his hometown to a Gatsby figure with a penchant for arson. With its striking juxtapositions between the rural and urban, embodied by Jong-su and Ben, Burning rejects the glamorization of Asian wealth and the notion of a universal Asian identity, as recently depicted onscreen in Crazy Rich Asians. Throughout the film, Jong-su scuttles between Paju-a mere checkpoint away from the demilitarized zone-and Seoul, hoping to salvage his relationship with Hae-mi and monitor the ever mysterious Ben. Even when Jong-su wins the affection of his childhood acquaintance Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), he quickly loses this fledgling romance to a wealthy urbanite named Ben (Steven Yeun).
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His father faces trial for assaulting a local government official, leaving Jong-su with the neglected family house and a diminished cattle farm. His mother abandoned the family when Jong-su was a child, returning only to request money from her unemployed son. His hometown of Paju is one of many small-town regions in South Korea facing overwhelming change amid urbanization. Jong-su is a silent, masculine type whose life is a sum of losses. Burning brings to focus the clash between these two countries through the life of a working-class man named Jong-su (played by Yoo Ah-in). Billions of dollars constitute the average household debt, millions of citizens have gone to the streets to overthrow a president cozy with conglomerate interests, and hundreds of thousands of young people remain jobless. The second faces ongoing economic turmoil. The first is a country of leisure, where 20- and 30-somethings stroll through elegant cafés and bob to K-pop club bangers. Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, a promising contender in the Foreign Language Film Oscar race, takes place in two South Koreas. This article contains spoilers for the plot of the film Burning.