Burning Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

Burning Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 3, 2019

Considering the fact that it clocks in at around two and a half hours, perhaps it would have been helpful to have included a “Slow” in Burning’s title. This interesting if almost intentionally obfuscatory psychological thriller from Korean director Lee Chang-dong takes a basic ménage à trois formulation and filters it through what might conceivably be termed a virtual Rashomon-esque ambiguity. That said, in this case the uncertainty is not due to different accounts of the same incident (since this film’s narrative style is closer in tone to an omniscient narrator), but instead that what is being depicted or talked about is what’s actually going on. Burning has attracted considerable attention on the festival circuit, and it evidently made it onto the “shortlist” of films competing for the Best Foreign Language Film in the Academy Awards, though it didn’t make the final cut. This is a film that deliberately asks more questions than it ultimately answers, and as such it requires a certain level of tolerance and, yes, patience from viewers as it unwinds a tale of aspiring writer Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) who early in the film “meets cute” with Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), who calls him by name and claims to have known him back in their school days, even though Jong-su has absolutely no memory of her. This is just the first of several similar plot elements where the viewer is left to ferret out whether or not things are “true”, but the entire film is such a study in relativism that after a while some may feel that such distinctions are more or less meaningless.

There is a consistently enigmatic flavor running through Burning, with a number of odd little elements which are dangled like kind of furtive clues, in a mystery that is itself not even that clearly defined. The whole Hae-mi identity issue is a salient case in point. She knows Jong-su’s name, which would seem to suggest her story of knowing Jong-su is “true”, but she also states she’s had plastic surgery, which is why Jong-su doesn’t recognize her. Later, it's revealed that Hae-mi is also a budding “pantomimist”, and there’s a truly bizarre sequence in a cafe where she pretends to peel and eat a tangerine, offering a bit of “philosophy” along the way which weirdly reminded me of a line in Wallace Stevens’ famous poem The Snow Man*. Later still, Hae-mi takes off on a "spiritual adventure" to Africa, and asks Jong-su to care for her cat, which he agrees to do. Except the cat is never actually seen, and, Schrödinger style, the viewer is left to wonder whether it's alive or dead or in fact even real.

Hae-mi and Jung-so become intimate fairly quickly (and there’s another kind of odd almost magical realist moment where Jung-so is entranced by a sunbeam while he’s having sex), though any nascent relationship is obviously put on hold by Hae-mi’s trip to Africa. Things don’t really kick into what passes for high gear in Burning until Hae-mi returns from her vacation, asking Jong-su to pick her up at the airport, which he gladly does. He’s downright shocked when Hae-mi appears with good looking and affluent Ben (Steven Yeun). Suddenly, there’s a rather tense undercurrent running through the film, as Jong-su, not exactly on a stellar career track, has to figure out how to, or even if he can, compete with Ben for Hae-mi’s affections.

There are a number of sidebars that accrue here which address a host of rather wide ranging issues, including everything from Korea’s apparently oppressive class structure (something which also plays into the recently reviewed Korean anime The King of Pigs) to gender stereotypes for women (in particular) to more “mundane” psychological and emotional issues like romantic jealousy. There's also a whole subplot involving a criminal proceeding against Jong-su's father that I personally had a bit of a challenge understanding what the pertinence was, at least within the context of Jong-su's romantic "issues". Perhaps because so much is left in a kind of virtual fog, the brutal showdown which caps the film attains an almost mythic grandeur, though even here, certain questions are left unanswered.

If Rashomon suggested that there’s an almost unavoidable unknowability when relying on different “witness” accounts of the same event, Burning makes a perhaps more ontological assertion that there’s an unavoidable unknowability — period, full stop. Even the film’s title can refer to any number of things, some of which may or may not be actually “real” (within the context of the film). Ben “confesses” at one point to enjoying a kind of weird prank of setting what are evidently ubiquitous greenhouses in Korea on fire, even though the film only ever really suggests that it’s Jong-su who might be considering such an act (after perhaps having been enticed by Ben's "confession"). But there’s also the “inner” burning of Jong-su being eaten up alive inside by jealousy and class envy. One way or the other, this film's deliberately opaque content may only indicate that it's the rational brain that will be going up in flames.

*The similarity in philosophy is summed up to me by Stevens’ line:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Burning Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Burning is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. The IMDb lists the Arri Alexa XT Plus as having digitally captured the imagery, which was finished at a 2K DI. The film kind of ping pongs back and forth between a more grounded, realistic style and what I referred to above as almost a magical realist touch. Sometimes these two approaches tend to segue into each other in the same scene. There's a prevalence of really deep blue tones that run through several outdoor scenes, and the palette pops quite vividly throughout the presentation. One almost hallucinatory club scene is bathed in a number of hues (one assumes representing the party's lighting), and detail levels are considerably less apparent in that sequence (see screenshot 19 for one example). Overall, though, fine detail is consistent and precise looking, and when not affected by lighting or (minimal) grading choices, the palette is nicely suffused and natural looking.

Burning Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Burning features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track in the original Korean. While there are moments of nice immersion here, notably the aforementioned party scene, or some of the outdoor material where ambient environmental effects predominate, this is often a quieter film, with dialogue between two or three characters providing most of the audio. There's still nice nuance in even some of these less ambitious sequences, with background noises dotting the side channels in several interior scenes. Fidelity is fine throughout, and there are no problems of any kind to report.

Burning Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• About the Characters (1080i; 2:29) is a brief EPK subtitled 140 Days of Passionate Performance.


• Teaser (1080p; 00:58)


• International Trailer (1080p; 1:21)


• Trailer (1080p; 1:49)

As is typically the case with Well Go USA Blu-ray releases, the disc has been authored so that the supplements follow one another automatically. After the supplements play, the disc then moves on automatically to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those trailers for other releases also play automatically at disc boot up.

Burning Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Burning is a fascinating viewing experience, and one that almost demands re-viewing. This is not an easy film to describe in a way, for any surface painting of its kind of minimal plot dynamics misses the really roiling emotional atmosphere that suffuses the story, not to mention its almost provocative tendency not to fully explain things. Technical merits are first rate, and even without much in the way of supplements, Burning comes Highly recommended.