Rainy Days

Rainy Days, released in 1979 as the Park Chung-hee dictatorship was nearing its end, has recently garnered renewed praise as one of director Yu Hyun-mok’s masterworks. The film, obviously approved by the Park government for its anti-Communist viewpoint, expands on one of Yu’s abiding concerns, the tragic history of modern Korea leading up to the Korean War (1950-1953). Yu previously explored this theme in the powerful Descendants of Cain (1968) and the mind-blowing Flame (1975).
Even though Rainy Days does deal with the war and the ideological division that scarred the Korean psyche for subsequent generations, it is neither a war film nor a “message” movie. Director Yu and veteran scribe Yoon Sam-yook are generally faithful to Yoon Heung-gil’s famous source novel, dispensing with masculine heroics, and focusing on how wartime ideological struggles affect one typical family.
The film is told from the perspective of a young boy Dong-man, whose village is overrun by the North Korean army soon after the outbreak of the war. His paternal uncle Sun-cheol joins the Communists almost by accident, but he still tries to protect his in-laws, including the boy’s maternal uncle Gil-jun, a Seoulite intellectual and a staunch anti-Communist. However, when the tide turns and South Korean and UN troops begin to push the Northerners back up, Sun-cheol, Gil-jun and other family members are forced to become enemies.
As is the case with Yu’s 1960s masterpieces, his direction and editing are dazzlingly expressionist but are firmly grounded in the earthly materiality of rural Korean landscapes. Some scenes almost take on the gravitas of mythical visions (the maternal grandmother’s dream of losing her tooth, presaging the tragic news of a family member’s death; or the climactic ‘exorcism’ involving a large snake). The camera effortlessly captures the texture of natural landscapes — bamboo forests, muddy puddles and rounded eaves drenched in rain — and carefully navigates the rooms of the traditional Korean house to chart the emotional cartography of the characters.
Even though made under a time of suffocating censorship, the characters of Rainy Days are not cardboard heroes and villains. The nuanced characterizations of Dong-man and his young friends easily overcome the annoying (adult) dubbing that mars almost all pre-1990s Korean films. Lee Dae-keun precisely conveys Sun-cheol’s wide-eyed, almost childlike bravado as well as the tormented confusion of a man who has little comprehension of the hostile environment he finds himself in; this burly man wilts like a gelded bullock as he sneaks into the family home as a wanted “Communist bandit”.
The grandmothers, the true gravitational centers of the piece, are doting and parochial but are far from long-suffering victims. Indeed, the film’s equivalent of the final battle sequence consists entirely of Dong-man’s paternal and maternal grandmothers engaged in devastating verbal combat. I do not wish to spoil the ending, but it involves the aforementioned snake in an astonishing folk-belief ritual that works perfectly as both a psychotherapeutic performance and an act of genuine spiritual communication, and leads to the profoundly moving resolution reminiscent of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955).
Rainy Days is an exemplary Yu Hyun-mok film, showcasing the unique combination of his directorial prowess and intellectual vision: his natural eye for beauty, ceaseless quest for truth, and compassion for his characters. It is a spiritually cleansing motion picture grounded in the history and culture of Korea, yet embodying universal human aspirations and failings.