Joint Security Area (2000)

Synopsis

Major Sophie E. Jean (Lee Young-ae) of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission is summoned to the Joint Security Area, a small meeting point within the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea. She’s the perfect fit to lead the investigation of an incident in which a South Korean soldier stands accused of killing two North Korean soldiers in a remote outpost just beyond a historic location known as the Bridge of No Return. She’s ethnic Korean and speaks the language fluently, but was adopted and raised and educated in Switzerland. On her arrival, the UN commander gives her strict instructions: don’t do anything to upset either side. The truth of what happened is not so important. The question is: why.

From the onset, the stories being told by both sides don’t match up. The South claims their soldier, Sgt. Lee Soo-hyeok (Lee Byung-hun), was kidnapped and killed the two soldiers in order to escape. The North Koreans say Lee burst into their outpost and committed the killings before fleeing. The number of bullets retrieved don’t add up correctly. The North Korean witness, Sgt. Oh Kyeong-pil (Song Kang-ho) supposedly signed a deposition … but it’s dated when he was still in a coma from his wounds. Major Jean interrogates everyone involved to begin peeling away the real story.

But … what starts as an engaging police procedural suddenly pauses as a long flashback shows us what really happened. The perplexing circumstances – kidnapping or unprovoked murder? – come into focus as we see the months-long events of forbidden cross-border connections that led up to the fateful night.

And then … we’re back to the present.

See It

I was enjoying the police procedural aspect and was settling in, anticipating having a lot of testimony and conflicting facts to sort through, trying to devine what happened along with the investigator.

Though I was disappointed when the flashback kept going, I realized this was the story the Director Park Chan-wook actually wanted to tell: of two Koreas and the soldiers who have been trained to hate and distrust one another and yet find they have more in common than they had been conditioned to believe. While this section might have been trimmed, it nonetheless got me invested in the fates of the main characters.

Song Kang-ho plays the cautious Sgt. Oh with equally balanced doses of wit and intelligence. Watch how his expressions convey his realization that his actions are dangerous, even as he is enjoying himself. Lee Byung-hun gives his opposite number, Sgt. Lee, just the right amount of balance as he lurches from devil-may-care attitude to absolute terror.

Director Park delivers the inevitably sad ending that unflinchingly conveys how heart-breaking are the divisions between these two worlds that are literally divided by a few feet of “neutral” earth. The final replay of an earlier scene reinforces how much there is to see once we know all the facts and look closely enough.