The Sunshine Policy was articulated in 1998 by South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, and allowed greater political contact between North and South. High-profile business ventures were formed – family members were briefly reunited. The term “sunshine policy” was inspired by Aesop’s fable The North Wind and the Sun, wherein a power struggle between the sun and the wind demonstrates that persuasion is preferable to force. In November 2010, South Korea’s conservative government ended the policy.
Kyu-hwan Jeon’s DANCE TOWN takes the optimistic view that this setback does not mark an irreconcilable difference, and Jeon doesn’t take sides in his portrayal of the Korean divide. North or South, remarks one of his characters, “kimchee is kimchee“. DANCE TOWN brings a snowy rallentando to Jeon’s trilogy which began with ANIMAL TOWN and MOZART TOWN. Each film looks at Korean life through the eyes of urban misfits who have been excluded from, or simply ignored by the rest of society. In DANCE TOWN, the North Korean defector Jeong-nim Rhee (stage actor Mi-ran Rha) represents countless marginalised citizens who live on the broken edges of society in the metropolis of Seoul. The camerawork consistently disengages from Jung-nim’s emotional influence and maintains a broad overview of society in Korea.
Jeong-nim Rhee is a former professional table-tennis player, happily married to Jung Man-il, an older businessman who brings colour to the spartan marital apartment with cosmetics and porn smuggled from South Korea. Their secret plans to cross the border come to bitter fruition when the contraband is discovered, Man-il is incarcerated and Jeong-nim flees to the South alone – but it’s not the place she and her husband conjured in their daydreams.
The TOWN trilogy has had little domestic success because Jeon will not resort to melodramatic sentiment. It’s this stubborn loyalty to the authentic, to the straightforward depiction of cold reality, that has won him great acclaim and awards in international film festivals abroad. The personality cult and public executions which blight North Korea are not washed over, but if the North and South are characters in DANCE TOWN, the North is not a pantomime villain. Both have their light and dark sides. Jeong-nim flees a happy, liberated home in the politically oppressive Pyongyang, and finds herself alone, under the scrutiny of security cameras and at the mercy of her intrusive neighbours in the vibrant, westernised South. Slow and steady, with sparse dialogue, we are thrown into Jeong-nim’s new world as her life washes up against those of others. Jeong-nim submits hopelessly to each new encounter, whether it’s a frantic assault from a desperate lover or a well-meaning smothering from a fanatical Christian, with equal abandon.
A dance can be a display of joyful sexual abandon, or a strictly choreographed ritual – Kyu-hwan Jeon’s use of the word “dance” in the title to this film could refer not only to Jeong-nim’s different lovers and homes, and the levels of autonomy and engagement those relationships bring; but to the seemingly endless, complex dance that is being performed by the two estranged halves of the whole country.