Daughter of Fire (불의 딸, BUL-UI TTAL, 1983)

"Daughter of Fire" is 1983 mystery, film-noir style film. And its main theme is shamanism. It is film which has its artistic quality for some sort of international film festival or whatever. This means this film is not so much hilarious. But it is also interesting film anyway.

There are some basic problems. One problem is that it utilizes its shamanism theme, only for mysterious old cliche style orientalism. Such as western culture is too material focused, but eastern culture has its mysterious non-material good things. Or, now the world dominated culture is western culture, but for yin-yang stuff, we have to get more eastern culture, to find the balance point. A little boring and a little senseless story.

Furthermore, from some point of view, in this movie, this eastern culture something story is even treated as some sort of patriotism in very odd way. That is like this: this film is Korean movie for Korean people, and Korea also has its own traditional Eastern culture. What I am saying is: the purpose of this movie may be saying that Korean people has good traditional Eastern culture and it is better than western culture in unknown mysterious way.

So the theme and the design of the movie sounds not that interesting.
But surprisingly, this movie is not that boring.
The main reason of not-boring story is because this movie has its good editing and detailed plot which has mystery and film noir style.

The first thing that you can see in this movie is some guy is being suffered by some disease or fatigue. He's got a seizure or something. After a short time his seizure is gone, but he finds that his son is suffered by somnambulism. Then, we can see there are lots of Christians in his family, and these American evangelist style Christian family members are praying for this sick son. In this movie, they do not look good. They are thinking of this disease of the son as some curse or satanic attack from devils.
This makes this movie to be one of a few examples of the Korean films criticizing Korean evangelists.

The next thing in this movie is actual entrance of the main story. It is relatively funnier. It goes like this:
(1) He visits his psychologist to get some advice about his sickness, I mean mysterious seizure.
(2) He talks about his history and his theory about his symtoms.
(3) He begins to talk about his childhood and memory of her mother. Because he thinks his symptoms are apparent symptoms for a person who are destined to be a shaman, and her mother also has been suffered from shamanism related destiny of hers.

Now flashback starts. We can see his mother's story with his narration. It is really like film-noir movie. But it is happening not in western style city, but in eastern style small country village. This makes this movie interesting and unique. This makes audience to be curious about what is behind this mother and these symptoms.

After some scenes of the flashback, we can have some information about this mysterious mother. She was very beautiful, so beautiful that she was almost virtually haunting men. And for some mysterious reasons, she really loved  to see a fire, a burning flame. And also she really liked to do some shamanism dances. And all th men, especially her lovers or her husbands think this shaman thing was bad, because shaman is crazy, haunted job with bad reputation. So her lovers tried to stop her, make her not to do any shamanism dance, but then she mysteriously disappeared.

After this flahsback, now our main character, the son of this mysterious woman, goes to Jindo island, because he is a journalist or a reporter. It is to report a traditional festival of Jindo island. Why is this Jindo island festival so important? Because it is a festival for a narrow land passage appearing once a year from the tidal wave of the sea. It is traditonal Korean shamanism festival, but it also looks like Moses' miracle, and Christians also praise this land passage. This is a good chance to show how shamanism and Christianity make some conflicts.
In addition, Jindo island is the place where he was born, and now he tries to trace mysteriously disappeared his mother in Jindo island.

So the rest of the story is his searching for his mother's life and some other flashback scenes that show her mysterious way of living. These scenes include her lovers waiting for her, who is suddenly disappeared. These guys are waiting for her, with some burning torches all the time. This was because she really likes to see a fire. Some guy even dies  while he is waiting for her, with all the torches around his small boat. Because this guy originally met her in this fishing boat with its fish-get-around-light.

The conclusion of this movie is the main guy in the film finally sees a random funeral at the end of his journey. The funeral is traditional Korean style, and he suddenly thinks this funeral can be treated as his mother's without any specific reason. He dose some Dr. Zhivago look-a-like scene. And then there is a long, really long poetic narration. This narration looks like telling some reasons for his thought, but it is still not easy to understand.

And he comes back to his home in Seoul. He sees his sick son again, and he sees many evangelist Christians again. The final scene is he is laughing at his wife and all the other Christians in his family. And with some crazy smile, he begins to talk his theory of balance and he himself wants to be a shaman. His wife gets very angry but he leaves from his home, for a shaman's den.

This final conclusion is quite disappointing. Because it dose not tell you anything about his mother's real background, or the reason why she loves to see a fire that much. This means actually this fire loving thing dose not matter anyway. There is no reasonable explanation. It is O.K. that shamanism movie is not so reasonable, however it is not O.K. to me in case that it is not dramatic.

Another thing that I don't like in this movie is that there is too much traditional Korean shamanism song. This background music is not that bad at the beginning. In fact this shamanism song sounds good. It is eerie and mysterious. And it is really oriental. In a way, it is too oriental. But that is what this movie is doing. It was good at the beginning. The problem is there is too much of this music after the beginning. It gets boring and more boring. And sometimes this strong powered music is inserted to random scenes without any preparation. There is no decency. There is no honor.

One more problem of this movie is there are meaningless, I mean very meaningless erotic scenes. In 80s of Korean movies, these sorts of meaningless randomly inserted erotic scenes were really often. The only purpose of these scenes must be just for making some teasing movie poster, which looks like very erotic movie. This was for cheating the audience, and selling the movie. Even worse, these erotic scenes in this movie are not that erotic.

Maybe I can say this movie has O.K. quality and it has some of its fun factors to watch at least it has good mystery chasing story. But it is not as good as a movie to be really good one. This movie is directed by Gwontaek Lim, who is one of the biggest figure among the Korean movie directors. And he is still doing his jobs. Mostly on very well reputated movies. The actress who played the mother in this movie is Bang-hee, who was the favorite actress of the director Gwontaek Lim back in 80s.

One more thing. Jindo island mentioned in this movie is very famous in Korea for its local dog.