By Brian Hu

With Traces of Love, Korean director Kim Dae-sung once again transforms the romantic tearjerker into a provocative treatise on the human and moral limits of young love.

Melodrama is typically associated with the over-the-top, the unrealistic, the excessive, or the proclivity for impossible last-second rescues and tragic just-misses. In recent years, the melodramatic genre has transformed in directions both tear-jerking and radical, sentimental and sardonic. Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain comes to mind, as does Kim Dae-sung's 2001 film Bungee Jumping of their Own.

In contrast, another recent manifestation of melodrama is less cynical of the modern age. Or perhaps more precisely, it's cynical of cynicism, daring to be ironic by being absolutely sincere about such ideologies as love, sacrifice, and tears. Films like Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven and Xu Jinglei's Letters from an Unknown Women remake older melodramas with a neoclassical reverence, combined with a 21st century hipness. These films don't evoke old styles and sentiments for neo-conservative ends, but rather infuse their radical agendas (queer and feminist, respectively) with the slow, aching burn of tearful emotion.

Kim Dae-sung's latest film, Traces of Love, belongs in this second category. Like Bungee of Jumping of their Own, Traces of Love is built on a central plot twist (or two) which shocks us out of our expectations of the romantic melodrama genre. But whereas his earlier film did so to ironically test the limits of audiences' abilities to identify across genders and sexual orientations, Traces of Love's plot twists raise the stakes of the melodrama, intensifying it and in effect making it more over-the-top and more unrealistic. It operates on a level higher than the typical "suspension of disbelief" that we commonly use to make sense of the melodramatic universe, where the impossible intersects with "the real." Rather, the film locates in melodrama a magic world of human parallels and extraordinary coincidences. Its setting is not the city or the suburbs, but a wilderness of wooded mountains lined by sparkling, trickling streams. On those streams float auburn leaves that don't simply provide decorative color, but through the audacity of Kim's camera, magically connect human beings across time, space, and even mortality.

In fact, the retreat from city to nature becomes the occasion for the film to take the genre from the usual urban romance to a truly innovative melodrama. The main narrative of Traces of Love begins amidst skyscrapers and suburban sprawl. With all the cuteness of a Nora Ephron film, Traces of Love introduces us to a young lawyer Hyun-woo (Yu Ji-tae of Oldboy) who proposes to his all-smiles girlfriend Min-joo (Kim Ji-su of This Charming Girl) via apartment intercom. In their merry way, the characters interact in a parade of exchanges and looks that can be paraphrased as: "I love you," "No, I love you more!" It's all very typical of the romance genre -- or at least the mainstream Korean version of it -- until the film's first plot twist hits with terrifying might. Contemporary urbanity (in this case, the shopping mall) is frightfully transformed into a sublime force of nature. Characters are changed, narratives are side-tracked, and it goes without saying that the film's melodramatic thrust enters what seems like a bizarre alternate dimension.

The incident leads to a number of further complications, both political and personal. I won't go into them here not only because I don't want to divulge too much, but also because the film seems to shake them off with stubborn insistence, in favor of using the incident as a portal through which the lawyer enters nature and all of its melodramatic glory. Mountain peaks, wooded trails, and mini-deserts are depicted as having a magical ability to possess their urban visitors, hypnotizing them and giving them a new logic to life. In any other melodrama, this logic would be of the past: nature is equivalent to the countryside, which connotes a pre-urban world. But here, nature is the future of city, a fate protracted through parallax, where alternate future versions of self and friends manifest in beautiful and mysterious forms. It is in one sense, the enchanting (as opposed to anxiety-laden) version of Hong Sang-soo's country-getaway films like The Power of Kangwon Province.

I can't help but write in abstractions. Being more concrete would necessitate explaining the film's big twists, as well as betraying the film's own narrative strangeness. The oft-metaphysical way in which the film forces us to make connections between characters living and dead, between city and nature, between the spiritual and the practical seems to trivialize any verbal description of events and their consequences.

How well one accepts the film's final scenes of romance depends on how convincing the film is of depicting these metaphysical connections. If I have one criticism of the film, it's that the film perhaps doesn't go far enough with its peculiar breed of mystical melodrama; more development to the final romantic gesture would have better sealed the deal.

Back to my opening point about this new, hip form of melodrama: as with Far from Heaven and Letters from an Unknown Woman, Traces of Love is not apolitical. Kim's over-the-top metaphysics don't suggest political diffusion as much as the extremity of emotion and loss as a result of social irresponsibility and political corruption. For Korean viewers, the film's early plot-twist was not a surprise, not simply because it was divulged in the trailer, but because it was inspired by an actual occurrence in a Korean city. Kim uses the romance genre to pump historical fact with an emotional currency only possible through extreme feats of coincidences and parallel worlds.

But where do these possibilities come from? I'd argue that both Bungee Jumping of our Own and Traces of Love "twist" the film melodrama with extreme situations reminiscent of Korean soap operas. TV dramas like Winter Sonata and Autumn Fairy Tale are frequently denigrated as low-culture, yet their brand of over-the-top coincidences is what ironically lends Kim's films their artistic, high-brow flavor. Kim's achievement is that he discovers in film melodrama, the other-worldly logic of humanity and morality that, in TV dramas, was already there. Traces of Love thus contains traces of soap bubbling to the surface of the cityscape, waiting to balloon unexpected young lovers into alternate dimensions of romance.

Published: Friday, July 13, 2007