The Old Garden

Review by Leo Robson | 17 Aug 2007
So many films exhaust the viewer with gimmickry and over-elaboration that one which avoids both is ordinarily welcome; but Sang-soo Im's The Old Garden is unappealingly straightforward. Its portrayal of Oh, a former student activist emerging from prison after seventeen years, is in need of a jolt of energy. It never successfully dramatises the despair and frustration of what Saul Bellow called "the late failure of radical hopes." Its frequent flashbacks signpost rudimentary opposites - less hall-of-mirrors than bathroom mirror. In sum, it lacks the flourish and insight displayed by the two greatest films about student revolution - Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably and Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise. Those films projected a sense of camaraderie and the possibilities of youth; conversely, the revolutionist debates in The Old Garden are just like government meetings but for the other side.

In the second half, when the flashbacks reach the Gwangju Massacre, the film is livelier - though not intentionally. The sight of young seditionists doing ghastly things to themselves provides an exciting reprieve from the dramatic drudgery of Oh looking back ruefully at the girlfriend he abandoned and the daughter he has never met. Humdrum stuff, then, but for anyone desperate to see a film in which a man emerges from prison after almost twenty years, goes to live alone in a hut, and spends his new freedom reminiscing about falling in love against a backdrop of totalitarianism, then I Served the King of England, which has already shown in the Festival, should be out some time next year.