Many people around the world will be familiar with this work as "Park Chan-wook's iPhone movie." Sure enough, the fact that this 33-minute film was shot on an iPhone (or eight iPhones, to be precise) has proven to be one of the most effective marketing tools in recent film history. News stories about its creation have appeared in magazines and newspapers around the world, not because editors care very much about the film itself, but because the concept seems so trendy.
Dig a little deeper, and it's unclear what the ultimate meaning of this project was supposed to be. If the idea was to demonstrate that it is now possible for ordinary people to shoot feature films on easily accessible, inexpensive equipment, well, this is hardly news. It's been possible to do just that with consumer digital cameras for years. This message is also undercut by the fact that Park's budget for this film (financed by KT, network carrier for the iPhone in Korea) was $130,000, and he used a crew of 80 people.
If the purpose was to showcase the technical capabilities of the iPhone 4's digital camera, then that makes a little more sense -- but this too is undercut by the fact that Park's crew attached lenses to the phones, and the resulting footage went through a pretty intense retouching process in postproduction, including digital color correction, CGI and the like. The images we see onscreen could not have been created by the iPhone alone. In the end, I think, the phone was nothing more than a clever marketing ploy.
The good news is, about five minutes in you stop caring whether Night Fishing was shot on an iPhone or a pinhole camera. It's simply a fascinating work of art, regardless of how it was made. The shorter length means that Park Chan-wook and Park Chan-kyong, his younger brother who joined him in the director's chair, can adopt a relatively static and abstract narrative that, despite being so simple, never feels stretched too thin. Instead, the focus is on the emotions of the story -- and the creative ways in which the filmmakers translate these emotions into sound and images is breathtaking.
The film takes its time in getting started, giving the screen over to the UhUhBoo Project, an experimental music group that provided the sparse, creepy soundtrack to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance back in 2002. The music here is much more enveloping, and its otherworldly quality is a good complement to the story proper, which opens with Park Chan-wook regular Oh Gwang-rok doing some fishing at a remote lake. After the sky grows dark and the screen turns to black and white, something big hits his line. Improbably enough, it turns out to be a young woman (pop singer Lee Jung-hyun [A Petal], in a fantastic performance). The fisherman is even more stunned when she begins talking to him about his long-lost daughter. It only gradually becomes apparent that she is a shaman who has come to him as a bridge between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Making ample use of shamanic imagery and symbols (viewers who have seen the documentaries Mudang or Between may get more out of this film), Night Fishing explores one of the most fundamental and heart-rending aspects of human existence: the loss of a loved one. The focus on shamanic rites may point to the influence of Park Chan-kyong, an acclaimed visual artist whose short films have incorporated similar subject matter in the past. Indeed, looking at this film within the context of Park Chan-wook's filmography, it feels familiar, but subtly different. It is the smooth melding of two cinematic styles: sober-minded, ethereal, and sad.
Darcy Paquet