Like many films of the Korean New Wave cinema, “Peppermint Candy” by Lee Chang-dong explores social issues that remain haunting the collective consciousness of South Korea through a highly personal lens. The movie retrospectively follows the unfortunate life of its protagonist, Kim Yongho (Sol Kyung-gu), after his implied suicide at the opening scene. Similar to Chang-dong’s other work, especially movies like “Green Fish” and “Burning,” “Peppermint Candy” focuses on themes relating to masculinity, history, and national and political turmoil.
The opening of the film, titled “Outdoor Excursion, Spring 1999” begins with a scene of a river-bank picnic which happens to be a reunion of friends who have not seen each other in roughly two decades - all were friends with Yongho at some point in his life. The group starts blasting music from the stereo, dancing and singing along, until a dishevelled-looking Yongho interrupts the scene. He is shown to be drunk, worn out, and totally unhinged. He starts singing along and clapping at times and then wailing in agony at others which does confuse his ex-friends - though not enough for them to check up on him nor interrupt their dancing.
Yongho’s bazaar behaviour in the first scene is followed by him successfully climbing onto a nearby railroad bridge while ignoring the pleas of the only ex-friend that followed him after he first left the group. The scene ends with him screaming “I want to go back!” just as the train is about to hit him and the retrospect begins at that moment.
The retrospect is divided into seven parts, titled and dated, each showing a critical stage of Yongho’s life and providing explanations for the transformation of his character and its tragic present. The first retrospect takes us back to Yongho’s life three days earlier prior to his suicide. This part provides some explanations for Yongho’s dreadful state at the beginning as it shows him being broke and in debt, following the economic crisis of 1997 in Korea, and abandoned by his wife. He spends his remaining money on buying a gun to end his misery but that plan comes to a halt when a man who introduces himself as Sunim’s (Mun So-ri) husband tells him that Yongho’s first true love is on her deathbed.
In 1994, where the third part of the film takes place, we get to see his relationship with his wife Hongja (Kim Yejin) and their loveless marriage. Yongho has an affair with his co-worker and is generally disrespectful and abusive to Hongja. He then meets a man in a restaurant that he used to know which takes us back to 1987. During that time, Yongho was a ruthless policeman who was willing to go as far as torture to extract information from anti-government activists, one of these being the man he met later in the restraunt in 1994. The information he gets from the man leads him and his co-workers to Sunim’s hometown, in search of the wanted man. Yongho leaves them behind in search of Sunim but instead ends up sleeping with a woman he’d never met before. In 1984, when Yongho is new to the profession, he is shown to be peer-pressured into torturing a student demonstrator which ended up traumatising the rookie policeman. At this point, the psychological information necessary for the viewer to know the reasons behind his dislikable behaviour in the earlier parts of the movie slowly starts to reveal itself. But the big revealing moment took place in 1980 when Yongho was fulfilling his military service (which remains mandatory for all healthy Korean men till the present). Back then, he accidentally shot an innocent bystanding girl to death when his unit was dealing with a civil unrest.
In the last chapter titled “Picnic, Fall 1979” we are brought back to the same place where the movie started but with a totally different Yongho. Back then he was aspiring to fulfil his dream and become a photographer and to build a life with Sunim. Of course, we already know that none of that will happen and Yongho will end up a wandering heartbroken mess on the same riverbank two decades later.
All of the events of the story are set against the backdrop of important South Korean historical landmarks, such as the Kwangju Massacre during Yongho’s military service, and the ruthlessness of Yongho as a police officer mirrors the ruling approach of the president and military dictator Chun Doo-hwan that ruled the country from 1980 till 1988. By doing so, Chang-dong shows how masculinity is socially constructed across time and place leading to a set of expectations (like being tough and violent) that men are expected to fulfil when they’re occupying certain positions like that of a police officer.
Yongho’s personal life story is not only interlaced and overlapped with national history but also determined by it to a large extent.
But the viewer doesn’t have to know South Korean recent history to appreciate this compelling piece of modern cinema. Chang-dong’s prudently structured anti-climatic narrative alongside the masterfully solemn performance of Sol Kyung-gu makes it universally moving and relevant. “Peppermint Candy” is stellar in showing how the innocence and hopefulness of the youth slowly gets crushed by the harsh (and inescapable) reality and that the sudden progress and boom of a society cannot easily erase the scars of the past. “Peppermint Candy” is currently available on Amazon Prime Video.