The Berlin File

The opening scene of Ryoo Seung-wan’s new spy-thriller The Berlin File is, for better and worse, an apt introduction to the film. A confusing arms deal involving North and South Korean, Russian, and Arab agents goes spectacularly awry, somehow entangling Israel and America in the process and sending North Korean super-spy Pyo Jong-Seung on the run, the victim of an elaborate plot that has framed him as a defector and left him wanted dead by all sides.  A mosaic of action- and espionage-film clichés, yet bearing its share of novel qualities, what follows is equally lithe and languorous, light-footed and heavy-handed, and entirely frustrating.

There’s a good film lurking somewhere inside The Berlin File. The actors do what they can with the script, turning in strong performances of which the film is almost undeserving. Ha Jung-woo (known to American audiences as the hapless cab driver-cum-hitman of 2010’s The Yellow Sea) injects his character with staggering pathos and emotional complexity, as the North Korean agent on the run after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ryoo Seung-bum (the director’s brother and longtime partner in crime) is gleefully deranged as a sadistic North Korean operative/psychopath with an agenda of his own, sent to Berlin to clean up the mess. Playing the characters’ South Korean nemesis, Han Suk-kyu is a walking contradiction, both amused and horrified by the absurdity of the bloodshed he stumbles into.

The Berlin setting, though ripped from The Bourne Supremacy, is rendered unfamiliar enough to imbue the film’s borderline-potboiler tale of international espionage with an air of exoticism, and parallels between the Cold War and the contemporary situation in Korea emerge. But the film’s ending—a moment of unveiling in which Seung-wan shows his hand—is as predictable as it is disappointing, suggesting The Berlin File wasn’t made to stand alone. Beginning as a surprisingly moving tale of an unlikely protagonist and his quest for agency in an emotionally and politically convoluted world, the film forfeits most of its emotional impact when its conclusion evokes nothing more than the first installment of a new franchise.

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(Originally published on Film Comment's blog HERE)

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III

Roman Coppola’s new film, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, finds Charlie Sheen in the role of the titular protagonist: an endlessly narcissistic and inexplicably famous graphic designer whose two main loves (aside from himself) are women and booze.  Though he is ostensibly acting, those traits, combined with the character’s name—almost identical to the actor’s own—make it impossible to watchSwan without feeling that Sheen is playing anyone other than himself, as made notorious by his most recent stint in the headlines. 

But how interesting is it to see Charlie Sheen play Charlie Sheen? Engaging in an admirable yet ultimately unsatisfying discourse with reality, the film boils down to little more than an extension of Sheen’s recent one-man show.  In this way, the film is inherently flawed and hopelessly misdirected, a snake swallowing its own tail. The actor and director's lifelong friendship is the entire reason for the film’s existence (Swan is even more disappointing once you consider the fact that the result of the two men’s fathers’ collaboration was Apocalypse Now), yet as presented in the film, Sheen is nowhere near compelling enough to justify the muse/star treatment.

Swan feels like an inside joke, meaningful only to the filmmakers, a Playboy-chic fantasy far more impressed by its own intimations of psychodrama than any viewer will be.  An attempt at a tale of profound existential woe, Sheen’s character is left by his girlfriend, sending him into a downward spiral of self-pity and hollow introspection, his dealings with his friends and family interspersed with numerous live-action enactments of his daydreams and fantasies. This promises insight into Charles Swan and, by extension, Charlie Sheen, but the façade wears thin, almost immediately devolving into glad-handed wankery that becomes downright exhausting.

There are no surprises, no revelations and almost no fun.  In their place is forced, painfully self-conscious quirkiness and a bounty of neuroses that ring false. Coppola—who co-wrote both Moonrise Kingdomand the Darjeeling Limited—comes off like a second-rate Wes Anderson. Jason Schwartzman (Coppola’s cousin), playing Charlie’s comedian/musician and best friend, is once again typecast as a vaguely eccentric mensch, while Bill Murray, his manager, successfully keeps a straight face (much to the actor’s credit).  Liam Hayes’ Seventies-inspired soundtrack comes off as variations on a theme: the same tepid, retro-worship indie schmaltz done over and over again.

There is, however, an undeniable kinetic energy to the proceedings, a visual inventiveness to the flamboyant pop art mélange that defines the mise-en-scene.  Still, Coppola can’t art-direct his way out of a lousy script.

Swan is the latest development in Sheen’s very real attempts at public redemption and personal catharsis, turning the baring of his soul into commercial fodder.  The film’s attempts at ironic distance—elements of innocuous mockery such as the character being perpetually clad in a pair of purple-tinted sunglasses—indicate a newly acquired, if dubious, self-awareness on the part of the actor; a moral engagement that he believes will make him a more sympathetic character in the eyes of the public.  He may very well be on a quest for self-discovery, but the film definitely isn’t going to convince anyone of that.  Now that Sheen seems to care about the consequences of his actions, the question is, why should we?

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(Originally published on Film Comment's blog HERE)