20 years of the Joint Security Area
On September 9, 2000, the film "Gongdong gyeongbi guyeok JSA 공동경비구역 JSA (J.S.A.: Joint Security Area)" was released on the screens of cinemas in South Korea
Director Chan-wook Park.
The film instantly became extremely popular with South Korean moviegoers, gathering more than 2 million movie viewers in theaters in 2 weeks and breaking the previous South Korean film box office records. But not only the South Korean ones. For example, in Japan, this film in only 2 months - December 2000 - January 2001 - grossed more than $ 11 million.
In 2000-2001, the film "Joint Security Area" won two major South Korean film awards: "Blue Dragon" and "Grand Bell". In 2001, the film was nominated for the main prize at the Berlin International Film Festival - "Golden Bear". However, the jury of the film festival, chaired by American film producer Bill Mechanic, considered the film "Intimacy" by French director Patrice Chéreau more worthy of this award, the main advantage of which is the abundance of explicit scenes. Moreover, such an abundance that even Gary Oldman, whom the director wanted to see in the lead role in this film and who was never particularly shy, refused the offer. For your information: the rating of "Intimacy" according to IMDB barely exceeds 6. On Kinopoisk it is even less. In short, the South Korean film was left out of the awards. So is the Italian film "Malena" by Giuseppe Tornatore.
As for the assessments of professional film critics, the picture is quite contradictory. American film critics, representing major publications, mainly gave sour-condescending assessments, boiling down to the fact that South Korean cinema is still far from American cinema, but there are prospects to catch up sometime in the future. For example, Anthony Scott of The New York Times, who gave the film 3.5 points on a 5-point scale (and this became the highest rating for the film from professional American film critics), wrote in his review: "this warm, sorrowful film, plays like a downbeat variation on an old World War II picture from Hollywood."
And independent blogger Michael Smith described the film as follows: "Whenever I am lucky enough to teach contemporary S. Korean cinema in a class, J.S.A .: Joint Security Area is always the movie I screen first, even if it might not come first chronologically among the films I’ve chosen to show. This is because J.S.A.'s political-thriller plot lays out the entire history of the conflict between North and South Korea in a way that is succinct, accessible and informative without ever being didactic."
But in our opinion, the most adequate review of the film was given by the Russian film critic Katya Tarkhanova: "In fact, Chan-wook Park's "Joint Security Area" is a confusing detective story with a rich cultural context, subtle psychological overtones and some kind of spiritual correctness, justice. Such are rare now even come from Hollywood .... Americans never go further than a single case, so everything always comes down to individual family secrets, that is, damning family values. ... The "Joint Security Area" speaks of something else, much more general and serious. About the level of human personality not as a function of family values or patriotic, economic values, God knows what. No, only about the personality as such".
The well-known Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev notes in his review: “The South Korean film tells that it is possible to overcome obstacles precisely in individual relations between people, even if they belong to opposite conflicting sides. Of course, such a film cannot yet appear in the DPRK, where the dictatorship does not give indulgences in the sphere of absolutely ideologized art, which is practically indifferent to the individual."
68% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated this film from 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Chan-wook Park's film "Joint Security Area" according to FilmGourmand's version was 7,946, which allowed it to take 798th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
