A man travels to the eastern coast of Korea carrying the ashes of his deceased wife. He hopes to scatter them in a place closer to her hometown, which lies near the demilitarized zone separating North from South Korea, but along his journey he becomes burdened with the deaths of two more women who cross his path. Meanwhile, a nurse is attempting to escort the dying chairman of a business conglomerate to his hometown, which is also located just to the north or south of the DMZ. Pursued by henchmen of the chairman’s son, a politician who wants to keep his father’s journey out of the press, the nurse comes across the man carrying the metaphorical “three coffins.”
One of the most mysterious and evocative films of the 1980s, Lee Jang-ho’s The Man with Three Coffins is based on an award-winning novella by Lee Je-ha titled “Travelers Do Not Rest on the Road.” It is a road movie of sorts, but not one in which the journey provides much solace or understanding. In fact, the title of the book (which is also the film’s original Korean title) suggests as much: sometimes travelers, even on the road, do not escape the pain they carry with them.
The author Lee Je-ha said that he approached the writing of his novella in a spontaneous, unthinking manner – like writing while possessed. As a result, the pieces do not necessarily all fit together logically, but critics praise the work for its emotional cohesion and power. Director Lee Jang-ho says he took a similar approach to the film, focusing on conveying the story’s emotion above all else. He structures his film in fragmented, overlapping segments that make it feel more like a flood of recollections than a story with a beginning, middle and end.
Meanwhile, certain themes keep reappearing. The idea of a land divided in two, with its inhabitants unable to return to the place of their origin, is expressed through several of the characters. Notions of reincarnation and fate – strongly associated with Korean shamanism – also exert a strong hold on the characters. This accounts for the striking and sometimes frightening imagery related to shamanism that keeps appearing throughout the film.
Actor Kim Myung-gon, best known for playing the father in Im Kwon-taek’s Sopyonje (1993), looks completely different here as a grieving man who, without ever intending to, seems to bring death to whomever he meets. Meanwhile actress Lee Bo-hee, who worked extensively with Lee Jang-ho throughout the 1980s in films like Declaration of Fools and Eo-wu-dong, plays the nurse, and in a slightly surreal gesture is also given the roles of the deceased wife and a young prostitute.
Viewers are also likely to remember the very unusual color scheme that this film employs. Director Lee says that when he was a child living in Seoul in the years after the Korean War, the streets were always filled with broken glass. He and his friends would hold pieces of colored glass over their eyes, and see the world differently. While reading the novel, he said, he imagined an ocher yellow color. He was also inspired by the sepia tone of old war newsreels, and the monochrome of Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme (1966). Nonetheless, printing technology in Korea wasn’t quite up to the task of reproducing the exact shade that he intended.
Two and a half decades later, in 2014, the Korean Film Archive and CJ Powercast created a newly remastered DCP of the film, with color correction done in partnership with the director. Now, The Man with Three Coffins can finally be seen as it was originally intended. Several scenes towards the end, when a shaman’s boat crosses a misty lake, rank as some of the most beautiful images Korean cinema has ever created. It’s something that has to be seen on the big screen, at least once.