what really matters
by Douglas Messerli
Lee-Song Hee-il (screenwriter and director) 후회하지 않아 (Huhoehaji Anha) (No Regret) / 2006
Lee-Song’s seminal 2006
film No Regret is often described as the first gay feature film
in South Korean cinema, although there were others such as Road Movie of 2002 with that also
dealt with gay issues. What can be said, it that it is the first feature film
by an openly gay Korean director.
This film and his later works, moreover,
expressed an aspect of LGBTQ cinema that one might describe, in the best sense of
this term, as old fashioned. Lee-Song’s works mine the melodramatic tradition
of US filmmakers such as Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk, as well as Rainer
Werner Fassbinder. Moreover, unlike almost all the other films of their time,
Lee-Song’s films were about gay sex.
As Fran
Lebowitz recently explained, it is difficult for many of us who are older than
35 to comprehend why the Rainbow Coalition has in the past few decades has
spent nearly all their energies fighting for two issues which were not among our
youthful priorities: gay marriage and serving in the military. Most of us
before that time saw marriage as a delimiting heterosexual church and
governmentally-controlled bond which often led to disaster; and those of us
growing up during the Viet Nam War wanted nothing but to stay out of military
harm and its utter destruction of human life. Marriage and war were perceived
by my generation as terribly restrictive and destructive institutions that we
as lovers devoted to the sweet life wanted absolutely nothing to do with. It’s
not that we weren’t politically involved. We’d survived years of police
harassment and possible imprisonment, we’d fought back at Stonewall and many
other local battles, and we fought the war of neglect for AIDS. But checking in
with the minister or priest or even a friendly freelance marriage guru and
signing up to wear fatigues and bomb the crap out of Iraq or Afghanistan was
just not our thing.
Lee-Song, although still a young man today at 54, still believes
obviously that the major issue in the gay community is sex, and his films
concern how his characters, outsiders in Korean culture, attempt to
negotiate their ways to get what they need to survive, both on the literal
level of survival and in terms of their sexual desires.
I find,
accordingly, a kind of fresh air breathing through Lee-Song’s films that I am
sure younger people can’t at all sense. There is no stench here of trying to
appeal to the society at large. His characters are natural outsiders who have
found wonderful, often destructive, yet utterly entertaining and outrageously
original ways to survive in a society that either doesn’t even know they exist
or want them dead. And in that sense, his films breathe a new life into LGBTQ
cinema that is akin to the “New Queer Cinema” values that critics such as B.
Ruby Rich and others championed.
At 18,
Lee Su-min (Lee Yeong-hoon) has just been released from his loving orphanage
where he has spent most of his life. Unable to afford an education, he heads
straight for the capital city, Seoul, where he works at a factory job and a
position as a night-time driver in order to pay for his computer classes.
Everything might have gone well, except the factory is laying off staff, warns
his orphanage home friend Hwan-sun (Lee Seung-won) with whom he shares a rooftop hovel.
One
night, driving one of his drunks home from a bar—a familiar role for such night
time drivers— he meets Jae-min (Kim Nam-gil), a wealthy man who immediately falls in love with the
young driver. Pretending to have left his money in a billfold back in his
apartment, he invites Su-min up to his place, trying to seduce him into bed.
Su-min
is curious, but leaves without fulfilling his client’s desires—although there
is a moment, as only Lee-Song can dramatize, when he moves off to the elevator
that we can tell he is tempted to turn back and revisit the situation. But the
client is rich, Su-min simply trying to survive, and nearly everything in this complex
film about lost possibilities is based on his survival instinct.
Soon
after, however, when Su-min is fired from his factory job, he suddenly
discovers in the process that the son of the owner is none other than the
handsome Jae-min, who, when he realizes that the man he just fired is Su-min
arranges for the factory to fire another man instead, keeping Su-min in his
job. When Su-min perceives the switch of a man with a family to support over
himself, the factory owner’s son heartthrob desire, for what it is; he storms
into Jae-min’s office and rejects both the job and anything further to do with
his would-be admirer.
For a
while Su-min works as a dishwasher in a restaurant where Hwan-sun is employed as a
floor scrubber, but once again he meets up with employer outrage, in this case
when a plate as not been properly sanitized and cleaned. For the world in which
he now exists, people like our hero Su-min and his friend Hwan-sun will always
be perceived as dirty, unclean orphan boys, not to even mention what the
society does not know, that, in Su-min’s case, he is also an outsider
homosexual.
Despite, his deep reservations, Su-min joins up with night-club owner
(Jeong Seung-gil)
of XLarge, a male brothel, who tells him that he doesn’t hire “faggots.” “Our
customers don’t like faggots. I’m a faggot myself, and I don’t like ambiguity.”
At first, Su-min runs when he sees the degradation with which he will have
endure. But he returns and becomes one of the customers’ most sought-after boys
to bed. Most of the visitors to XLarge are drunkards who drink themselves into
a frenzy as they watch the half-naked boys dance—often turning into a lap
dance—before taking them into the narrow little rooms the club offers. What
kind of sex these customers offer is never established. One can only suppose
that it is a kind of sloppy drunk sex, with plenty of voyeuristic behavior
without full erections.
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But as
Su-min’s new colleague Jung-tae (Jo Hyeon-cheol) makes clear, there’s money to
be made at the club, particularly if a wealthy man takes a special liking.
Jung-tae has a girl and is simply waiting until he makes enough money to marry
her and live in luxury—the goal, one might add of many a prostitute throughout
the movies I’ve seen about this underground world.
Jung-tae insists he’s only in the job for
money, and he won’t let anyone fuck him—the very moment after Su-min has
apparently let his first john do just that. After explaining about his
girlfriend, he suggests that he’d even suck off Su-min—if he paid him,
strangely establishing a relationship where the two prostitutes of different
sexualities have formed a kind of odd sexual bond. Indeed, it is just such
ambiguous conversations that enrich Lee-song’s story, the relationships between
the various individuals never quite falling into the proper categories of
straight and gay, master or slave, bottom or top. Everyone in this director’s
work slips through life ambiguously despite the club owner’s insistence that he
hates just such behavior. These are survivors who quickly adapt to those in
control of the billfolds.
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Indeed, the scenes of the brothel are
some of the most interesting in the film, simply because their work here for
the first time is perversely honest. As opposed to placing boxes on a rolling
assembly line, here Su-min offers his most precious commodity, his own body, to
display and perform as he emotes. At least, here he is wanted as a full human
being instead of a pair of hands attached to muscles. This is a gay world
devoted to the body and nothing else, the way so many gay men have long treated
themselves in their dives into bars, bathrooms, and other pick-up places. If the “pick-ups” are not particularly attractive,
they offer money in the place of a beautiful face.
But
into this world one night suddenly strides the factory owner’s son Jae-min,
pretending to pick from amongst the “Madame’s” best boys. Obviously, he still
has Su-min on his mind, and the handsome orphan boy will have nothing to do
with it. He storms out, returning only for fear of completely alienating the
club owner. He fucks Jae-min, but makes it clear that if he ever attempts to
return, he will kill him.
So begins
a rather violent struggle, as Jae-min tries again and again to return and
contact the man who has so stolen his heart that he cannot survive without him.
XLarge even tells Jae-min that he has left their employ, but it doesn’t keep
him from his constant search for his whereabouts.
We also
observe another Jae-min accompanied by his mother (Kim Hwa-young) and his
supposed well-off female lover who together spend a great deal of time seeking
out possible wedding gowns for an occasion that clearly has never been
established and about which Jae-min is utterly disinterested. Of course, that
does not stop his imperialist mother, who is determined, despite the recognition
that her son is gay, that he shall be properly married. She is a warrior-queen
of the old world who will find a way around her son’s disinterest in female
flesh even if she must sacrifice the bride on her own bed, which she later
almost accomplishes.
This is
most definitely not the tame fare of Ang Lee’s The Wedding
Banquet (1993), a Chinese fantasy in which the necessary bride wins her gay
lover, even if her bargaining includes his other gay lover. If nothing else,
Jae-min is fierce in his attempts to win over the violently reluctant Su-min.
Through the XLarge connection, he makes an anonymous appointment with Su-min in
a hotel room.
There, in half light, he tells the story
of a shy man who falls in love with a poor man, the poor man refusing to accept
the shy man’s heart. “What should I do?” he pleads. Su-min’s answer is to “give
it up,” but when Jae-min turns he appears to have a gun (perhaps only a toy plastic
gun) in hand: “I’d rather kill you.”
Su-min
puts a brutal question on the table: “Of all the cocks I suck every night, why
should yours be special?” Jae-min responds: “Because it’s special. And yours is
special.”
Once
more, Su-min leaves. But this time, we can again see that despite the film’s
title, it is with regret. Something has been touched, a flame sparked between
the two in seemingly eternal struggle.
By the
time Su-min returns to the brothel, Jae-min has entered the establishment madly
looking for Su-min, opening doors, screaming, and demanding to see the man for
whom he is now ready to go to war.
The other
prostitutes grab him, pull him to the exit and, in particular the brutal Jung-tae,
beat him severely, Su-min entering at that very moment to demand they cease.
He
carefully hoists up Jae-min and carries him on his back to safety and a love
affair that changes both their lives. For the first time in both their
existences, they take a day off, visiting the beach like to teenage gay lovers,
and begin to heal in their adoration of one another. It doesn’t hurt, of
course, that Jae-min is wealthy, and can pay for their joyful time off. But
Su-min is only too happy to quit his job as a prostitute.
Inevitably, however, Jae-min’s mother returns to reap her revenge.
Insisting that her son’s former girlfriend is pregnant, she demands he marry
her, and will broadcast the pregnancy to the world if necessary to protect her
investment. The wedding invitations have already been printed. As critic Hayley Scanlon,
writing in Windows on Worlds, summarizes the mother’s
position: “Jae-min’s mother even later tells him that she doesn’t care if he
continues to sleep with men, but that he must marry the woman she’s chosen for
appearance’s sake, little caring for the emotional wellbeing of the oblivious
fiancée she is about to condemn to a loveless marriage.” After visiting his
father, Jae-min realizes that he has no choice but to abandon his true love,
Su-min, with whom he now cuts off all communication.
Even
Su-min’s attempts to visit him results in a freeze-out, as Jae-min, girlfriend
in hand, and flanked by his father and mother, refuses to even recognize his pleading
lover.
Before
these major incidents, a great deal of other important sub-plot incidents have
occurred which give this film a further rhythm and complexity. Su-min’s former
prostitute friend, Jung-tae has lost all of his money as his girlfriend and a
man to whom he has loaned his money run off together, she employing all his
credit cards. Always violent, he becomes even more determined to get even with
the world.
Another
young wide-eyed boy from the country, Ga-ram (Kim Dong-wook) has been hired by “Madame,”
a kind of clumsy but charming oaf who Su-min takes under his wing, offering him
his bed since the boy has no place to stay.
Both of
these figures play a large emotional role in Lee-song’s near epic cinema. As he
accumulates money, Ga-ram purchases a new car which, at the very moment in
which Su-min is attempting to make contact with Jae-min, the boy crashes,
killing himself in the event. The boy whom we have seen with his arm thrown
across his loving bedmate’s chest in a couple of scenes, has now also
disappeared from Su-min’s life, a loss signified by our hero’s collection of Ga-ram’s
ashes from the cemetery.
Simultaneously, Su-min comes to perceive that his isolation from Jae-min
is not his former lover’s decision, but obviously that of his family.
Accordingly, he asks the now angry and quite vicious Jung-tae to help him
kidnap Jae-min and to destroy him as a representative of those who promise love
but cannot keep their commitments.
Such
melodrama thrives in the mishap of coincidence. And in this film, the moment
after Jae-min has pretended not to even recognize Su-min, we see him in the
elevator. There he finally turns to his fiancée, explaining that the man who
has just come up to him is, in fact, the one he truly loves, that he cannot
love her and never has.
Furious, she slaps his face. The wedding is clearly over, Jae-min having
finally proven that he is a man willing to defend his queer love and not a pawn
in the powerplays of his parent’s cruel regime.
But it is too late. Shu-min and Jung-tae
have already hog-tied Jae-min and deposited him in the trunk of his own car.
They drive to a distant woods where Jung-tae digs a grave, depositing the son
of the factory owner—symbolic to him of all evils of those with money—into it,
as he begins to toss the soil over the body of Su-min’s still protesting ex-lover.
Finally, unable to bear it any longer,
Su-min intervenes, demanding Jung-tae stop. But this time the prostitute has
grown into a villain of such proportions that he not only refuses, but attacks
Su-min with the shovel, knocks him over the head, and tosses his unconscious
body into the grave as well.
Furious
with everyone, he goes sculking off into the woods, presumably to make his way
back to civilization or destroy himself for now having been responsible for the
death of two men.
Jae-min,
still conscious, attempts to awaken his lover now laying off over his own body,
but he cannot break loose from his ties. But finally, Su-min returns to
consciousness. This time we observe Jae-min carrying his lover on his back.
They
make their way back to Jae-min’s auto. All this time, it has been snowing, and
as they make their way down the road, Jae-min suddenly loses control, the car
slamming into a tree. It is almost as if fate is determined to kill them off
several times until they learn their lesson.
Both men, fortunately, have survived, and
a local police car has spotted their crashed auto and the policemen are on
their way to check on their well-being. But as the two come back to
consciousness yet again, Jae-min reaches over to grab his friend’s cock, the
two, who now realize what matters most, beginning to engage to sex as one of
the policemen puts his face to the window to check on them.
The
police go their way, realizing that they are needed here, as the two men
presumably reacquaint themselves, despite everything that has happened, with
what truly matters in life, love and sexual satisfaction.
I don’t
care how many young men in gay films trot down the marriage aisle, how many lesbians
finally make it through boot camp, I have never seen a happier ending to an
LGBTQ movie as in Lee-song’s No Regret.
Los Angeles, January 18-19, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).
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