Psy may have made the Seoul district of Gangnam a near-universally recognized symbol of wealth, glamour, and ostentatiousness, but it was not very long in the past that Gangnam was little more than farmland.
Gangnam Blues takes place in 1970 (the Korean title is simply “Gangnam 1970”), at the critical moment when power brokers identified the area as a development zone with great potential, and frenzied real estate speculation followed.
The key protagonists in this modern-day land grab were politicians, businessmen, and gang bosses, but the heroes of Gangnam Blues are quite a few steps down the social ladder. Jong-dae (popular singer/actor Lee Min-ho) and Yong-gi (Kim Rae-won) are two young men who enter adulthood as destitute rag pickers, but through a combination of ingenuity, skill, violence and grit start to rise within the hierarchies of rival gangs. Eventually, they become minor players in the drama of Gangnam’s transformation.
The gangster genre, like any genre, is known for its conventions, replicated in loving variation from film to film: low-level lighting, formal but crude-looking suits, casino/brothel/hotel businesses, contract killings, exchanged suitcases of money, room salons, the capture and torture of rival gangsters, and street battles involving guns (in Hollywood films) or knives, clubs and pipes (in Korean films). Apart from these surface details, the genre is also particularly well suited to depicting the mechanics of power: how one person outstrengths, outsmarts, buys or seduces another, within a complex overall hierarchy of power relations. The best gangster movies are just as much about money and politics as they are about violence.
Poet-turned-film director Yoo Ha has experience depicting gangsters and violence.
A Dirty Carnival (2006), set in contemporary times, follows the career path of a young man who joins a criminal organization in order to cover his mother’s hospital bills. Once Upon a Time in High School (2004) is not a gangster film, but it centers on school violence and is also set in the Gangnam region in the 1970s. Both films present violence not as isolated acts, but as part of an overall system in which people are driven by need, ambition and fear to exploit the weak and seek out vulnerabilities in the strong.
Gangnam Blues also proves to be a great showcase for director Yoo’s vision and talent. Although it requires some concentration to follow its complex plot, the film imparts an impressive depth to the violence and deception shown on screen, as if it were all a part of a tense chess match. At the same time he devotes considerable attention to the surface: the look and energy of the film is thrilling, and the crowd fights in particular are as painful to watch as they are impressively choreographed and executed. The end result, as with his previous films, is that Gangnam Blues addresses the topic of violence in a sophisticated way, but never fully de-glamorizes it either. You could flag this as one of the work’s faults, or you could argue that the contradictory feelings that the film gives you – of being simultaneously repelled and seduced by violence – is what makes it interesting.
As for the Gangnam district, viewers familiar with the area will find it amusing to hear the various parts of this dusty agricultural town referred to with place names now associated with Prada and Louis Vuitton. But in many ways the development of Gangnam, which was driven forward by a mixture of corruption, greed, and violence, parallels the way in which South Korea as a whole achieved its economic miracle in the second half of the 20th century. So as specific as this film might be in terms of its local details, the story it is telling is the story of a nation.