There is a cat in this film. A young woman says she has a cat. A young man goes to her apartment to feed it while she is away. He opens cans of food. He leaves them out. The food disappears. But he never sees the cat. Not once. He searches the apartment. Under the bed. Behind the refrigerator. In the closet. Nothing.
He starts to wonder if the cat exists.
This is the first thing the film takes away from you. A small certainty. A cat. And once you notice it’s gone, you start looking at everything else in the film and wondering what else might not exist.
I want to tell you about this film. But I want to tell you the way the film tells you: slowly, with gaps, with the persistent feeling that something is being kept from you. Something you can almost see. Something just behind the next scene, the next conversation, the next glance that lasts a beat too long.
There are three people.
The first is a young man. He lives near the border. Not a metaphorical border. The actual border, where loudspeakers from the other side broadcast propaganda that drifts across the fields like weather. He delivers things for a living. He wants to be a writer but he hasn’t written anything. He has the posture of someone who has been waiting his whole life for something to happen and is beginning to suspect it never will.
The second is a young woman. She knew him when they were children. She reappears one day, bright and talkative, performing a pantomime in front of a shop. She is good at pantomime. She can peel an imaginary tangerine so convincingly you can almost taste it. She tells him the trick is not to imagine the tangerine is there. The trick is to forget it isn’t.
Remember that. It matters later.
The third is a man she brings back from a trip to Africa. He is wealthy. He drives a Porsche. He lives in Gangnam. He is handsome, polite, and completely opaque. His apartment is immaculate. He never seems to work. He smiles often. The smile reaches his mouth but stops there, as if his face has been informed of the appropriate response but his interior has not been consulted.
The young man from the border looks at this man and feels something he can’t name. It is not jealousy, exactly. It is the specific discomfort of standing next to someone who has everything you want and appears to feel nothing about any of it.
The wealthy man tells the young man a secret. He does this casually, the way you might mention a hobby. He says he burns greenhouses. Not his own. Other people’s. Every two months or so, he finds a greenhouse near where someone lives. He burns it. He says the greenhouse is so close to the person’s home that it should be discovered immediately, but it never is. Nobody notices. He says this gives him a feeling he can’t describe.
The young man asks: isn’t that illegal?
The wealthy man smiles. There it is again. The smile that stops at the mouth.
He says he is going to burn a greenhouse very soon. Very close by.
The young woman disappears.
Not dramatically. Not with a scream or a struggle or a phone call that cuts out. She simply stops being reachable. Her phone is disconnected. Her apartment is cleaned out. Nobody seems to know where she went. Nobody seems to be looking.
The young man looks. He drives the roads around her neighbourhood searching for burned greenhouses. He finds none. He begins to wonder if “greenhouse” meant something else. He begins to wonder if the wealthy man was telling him exactly what he was going to do, in words that sounded like a metaphor but weren’t.
He cannot prove anything. There is no body. There is no evidence. There is only absence. And absence, as any detective will tell you, is the hardest crime to prosecute.
The director of this film is South Korean. He has spent his entire career making films about people who cannot quite see the truth of their own lives. People who are too close to the wound to identify the knife. He adapted this story from a short piece by Haruki Murakami, which was itself inspired by an American story about a son and a father and a barn. Three countries. Three fires. The burning passes from culture to culture, changing shape but not heat.
He does not tell you what happened to the young woman. He does not tell you because he understands something about storytelling that most filmmakers don’t: the moment you answer the question, the question dies. And the question, alive, is more powerful than any answer could be.
Did the wealthy man kill her? The film gives you evidence. The cat she left behind might now be living in his apartment. He wears a bracelet that might be hers. He washes his hands often. He yawns during moments of extreme emotion, as if feeling things bores him. These are clues. They are also, possibly, coincidences. The film does not distinguish between the two.
There is a scene that contains the entire film in three minutes. It is late afternoon. The three of them are together at the young man’s farm. The sun is setting. Miles Davis is playing. The young woman stands up and begins to dance. She takes off her top. She dances with her eyes closed, her arms raised, the light turning her body amber. She is not performing for either man. She is somewhere else. She is genuinely beautiful and genuinely free and the moment is genuinely sacred.
The wealthy man yawns.
The young man weeps.
Everything you need to know about these three people, about class, about who is allowed to feel and who has stopped feeling, about what happens when beauty meets indifference, is in that scene. The rest of the film is a slow unpacking of what those three minutes contained.
The film ends with an act that may be justice or may be madness. The young man makes a choice. You will watch him make it and you will not be sure if he is right. You will not be sure if the evidence was enough. You will not be sure if he solved the mystery or invented it. You will not be sure if the young woman is dead or simply gone. You will not be sure if the cat was real.
You will sit with this uncertainty for days. It will feel like something is missing. Something small, essential, just out of reach. Like a name you can’t remember. Like a cat you’ve never seen but keep leaving food for.
This is a film about the space between what you know and what you believe. It is about poverty and wealth and the specific violence of being invisible to someone who has more than you. It is about storytelling itself: the danger of narrative, the way a writer can build a story out of suspicion and call it truth.
It is about a greenhouse that may not be a greenhouse. A cat that may not be a cat. A disappearance that may not be a disappearance.
It is about burning. And it is called exactly that.
Burning (Beoning) Directed by Lee Chang-dong South Korea, 2018 | 148 minutes
Leave a Reply