This is the picture of a young happy couple, yes, but also an image of unbearable irony. Behind the glamorous beauty of the couple, played by Yeom Jung-Ah (an ex-miss Korea) and Ji Jin-Hee (not too shabby himself), lies the ugly legacy of a long era of military dictatorship and one of the darkest chapters of South Korea’s recent history.

The commercial success of the soberly entitled May 18th, by Kim Ji-Hoon, this summer (the CJ Entertainment film took the top spot at the box office with 1.45 million viewers, taking in US$ 10.1 million in its first weekend) shows the enduring impact of the event on the country’s collective memory, and its lasting,  symbolic and emotional importance.

Originally a mere student demonstration against the closing of Chonnam National University, the protests that took place on that day were met with extreme violence. The brutality of the paratroops mobilized to crush the movement was such that the local population formed a “citizen army” that was able to stand up to the professional soldiers for a short while. But this victory could only last for so long and after a few days of an uncertain peace, the enraged military indulged in a proper carnage and quelled any kind of resistance for good. During those tragic days, military repression claimed a heavy toll on the civilian population, resulting in as many as 200 victims and a 1000 injured according to official figures. Estimates today range from 500 to 2,000.

The Old Garden opens with the release of Oh Hyun-Woo, after 17 years of incarceration. Involved in the insurrection and all sorts of guilty socialist activities, he was relieved of his freedom for his political activism. The film proceeds to map out his reconstruction, after this long spell in prison.

As Hyun-Woo comes back to the village where Yoon-Hee used to hide him, the film moves from secret to secret, following an undulating curve between past and present, without actually privileging one timeline over the other. The love story between the young political dissident and the art teacher is methodically explored and put in perspective through a series of intercutting flashbacks. Each psychological knot, each drama is dissected in sequences that traverse the linear chronological order of historical events like an unseen high voltage wave.

Instead of dealing with History directly, Im Sang-Soo focuses on individual trajectories, and their twists and turns. The Old Garden is neither a straightforward representation of the Gwangju tragedy, or an expression, or an indication of a truth about history, it is rather a disposition, a way of waiting for a truth. If the Korean director seems to offer a more classical treatment, a more orthodox vision than is customary in his sometimes provocative works, it is in adequacy with his subject-matter, which he actually subverts by staying at a distance from both the personal and the political. He exploits the melodramatic matter of the love story adroitly, without ever indulging in the omnipresent temptation of sentimentalism, and the romance is just about enough to bring a touch of acute poignancy.

The love story is not only doomed (a archetypal trope of Korean melodrama), it is made possible  solely insofar as it is thwarted. Hyun-Woo, the central character is forced to lead the clandestine life of a “submarine”, to quote the expression that was used at the time to allude to the exiles from State repression, but there, away from the world, is the place where he finds a utopia he did not seek, in the company of Yoon-Hee. While they stay at the periphery of the political conflicts, as if it was produced by and in the margins of history, their love grows, but it also history that will make this love perish. 

What remains is the remote idealism of a long-gone youth and a vague but almost overwhelming nostalgia, as the “old garden”, always sought, but never attained, turns out to be an Eden that actually took place but was forsaken for a hypothetical (and perhaps chimeric) greater good. This idea of a paradise lost is suggested in one of the most moving scenes of the film, Hyun-Woo’s departure for Seoul. In an endless, heart-wrenching moment, the activist leaves his mistress alone in the rain. The most trivial details contribute to the composition of the valediction sequence : the pouring rain, the impatience of the bus driver, and the silence of the couple, weighing heavily on the action, often relinquished, most of the time suspended, like a plumb line.

What remains is also the beautiful portrait of a woman: both at the heart and at the edge of the story, Yoon-Hee is left with only the possibility of living, painting and perpetuating (her memory/desire) with dignity, suffering the fate of an era that destroys her love, happiness, and condemns her to an existence of solitude and regret. But beyond the grave, Yoon-Hee is guiding Hyun-Woo with her notebooks, drawings… the testimony that she did live. That she was there and all of it was real. In contrast, Hyun-Woo, an ordinary victim of State repression (the doctors diagnose his post-prison state as “typical”), whose individuality was flattened into submission, fades into the nocturnal urban mass, bringing this poem of unfulfillment to a fine closure. Perhaps that’s why he film leaves the viewer with a curious sense of incompletion in the end, as well as the bitterness and beauty of unfinished sentimental business and elusive women.