hankyoreh

From reading the reviews, it seems that Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, which opened this year’s Cannes festival, is a bit of a letdown. Although praising the film’s visuals, critics seem unimpressed by the acting and bored by the dialogue. A critic from The Telegraph in the UK is more specific in his criticism: "The one consistently false note in My Blueberry Nights is the extensive use of voiceover. These meditations on matters of the heart are about as profound, and almost as annoying, as those of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City."

With apologies to fans of Sex and the City, it has to be admitted that heavy use of voiceover narration is one of the easiest criticisms one can toss at a film. The reason is simple and familiar: "showing" is almost always more

effective than "telling". The voiceover tells us, "I felt so stupid I wanted to hit myself," but it’s far more effective to show the actor actually smacking himself in the head. Voiceover narration is lazy filmmaking.

...Or is it? While the idea makes sense in principle, it’s also true that, when done well, voiceovers can achieve

breathtaking effects. The memorable opening of Hiroki Ryuichi’s Vibrator consists merely of a woman walking back and forth in a convenience store, but the voiceover presenting her inner thoughts pulls us forcefully into her

world. In only five minutes we gain a detailed sense of her emotional life. In a surprising touch, the film even adds the occasional printed intertitle to show us words she dares not speak out loud.

Going back further in film history, no less a master than Robert Bresson relied heavily on voiceover to add to and

shape our perceptions of the images we see on the screen. In Diary of a Country Priest, the priest’s dilemmas and anxieties are presented almost entirely through voiceover, in contrast to the guarded and inexpressive face of the main actor. As the film progresses, we come to rely on the voiceover more and more as the emotional lifeline that ties us to the work.

With a little creativity, voiceover can be a novel and powerful way to transmit information to the viewer. But perhaps even more interesting is the way that voiceover can establish a sense of intimacy between the viewer and the characters. Part of this is just a skilled use of technique: directors often manipulate the soundtrack,

softening the sounds of the outside world and modifying the pitch of the voiceover to make it sound more immediate. It’s like we are inside the character’s head, buffered from events on the outside, hearing thoughts as they are spoken.

As viewers, we demand many things from films: excitement, mystery, wonder, terror, laughter... is it unreasonable to seek intimacy as well? The idea of a novelist establishing an intimate connection with a reader seems uncontroversial, but in cinema - a much more impersonal medium - the hurdles are far greater. That some directors attempt this, and are largely successful, is encouraging to see.

For their part, Korean directors seem to do quite well at avoiding the "bad" use of voiceover narration. One of

Korean cinema’s strengths is its immediacy and lack of moralizing. Unlike Hollywood films, which at times seem to obsess over telling its viewers what to think, Korean films usually just present their stories and let viewers draw

their own conclusions.

On the flip side, however, it seems that few Korean directors have ever attempted to create the sort of emotionally intense inner monologue that we see in Vibrator or Diary of a Country Priest. Admittedly, the images of urban Koreans that fill my mind are those of collective experiences: blind dates, soju parties, Karaeoke rooms

(noraebang), work training sessions, etc. It makes me wonder, though: are the inner thoughts of a

tortured, romantic loner - seen, for example, in Dostoyevsky’s short novel White Nights - something that Korean audiences would have no interest in, or is this an untapped niche that some Korean director of the future is destined to fill?