The Death of Imagination

War of the Arrows (최종병기 활) is a movie we'd already sent back once, so we were determined to watch it this weekend. Fortunately, the weather cooperated: There was only drizzle on our expedition to South Chinatown, but we awoke from our naps to find it pouring. I tossed a load in the laundry, brewed a cup of Tieguanyin, sliced up a freshly-baked mixed nut mooncake, and sidled up next to the Old Man on the couch with my flower cards laid out in front of me.

The film itself is a reasonably satisfying action flick, never really straying from the conventions of the genre. The plot is kidnap-and-rescue, culminating in a showdown between two expert archers. There are no supernatural elements and a minimum of wire fu (essentially one scene where the protagonist and his pursuers need to cross a chasm). There's no mcguffin; it all comes down to one of the men being slightly more skilled than the other. For someone who cut his teeth on a diet of Hong Kong cinema in the 90s, it's like a bowl of cold noodles.

For me, it was all about the setting: Korea during the Second Manchu Invasion. Our hero's father loses his life for supporting Gwanghaegun during the coup which brought his incompetent nephew Injo to the throne. Where Gwanghaegun managed a shrewd balancing act in the conflict between the Ming and the Manchus, Injo threw his lot in wholeheartedly with the Chinese, thereby pissing off the his northern neighbours and precipitating two invasions. The main action of the movie takes place during the more serious of these, which resulted in Injo's ignominious capitulation.

The father's last act before dying is to send his children, a son and a daughter, along with his treasured bow to safety in Gaesong, an ancient capital of Korea now located just over the North Korean border from Seoul. Unfortunately, this puts it right in the path of the Manchu invasion force and the daughter is dragged off on her wedding day along with her fiancé, the son of the retired official who sheltered them. In trying to rescue her, our hero manages to draw the attention of a squad of Manchu warriors and sets off for the border with them in hot pursuit.

Imagine what is was like for a language fiend like me to find that a huge chunk of the dialogue is in Manchu. The barbarian soldiers speak nothing else, and as the chase starts we discover that the hero and heroine very conveniently know it as well due to their father's being stationed along the border (quite a feat in the latter's case, given that she's shown as being all of five or six when they are forced to flee into exile). No sooner had we broken for intermission than I was in the library, tearing through the boxes in search of my Classical Manchu grammar (which I found).

As usual, I wasn't able to make out much of the Korean aside from the speech levels, which were surprising at times (e.g. the father using formal polite endings with his young children rather than the authoritative style, which never occurs). I had to pause the film to decode the (pseudo-?)Classical Chinese couplet inscribed on the bow and reproduced above. (Roughly, "Push forward Mount Tai, let fly like a tiger's tail".) And I was left scratching my head by the mistranslations of the title, which is literally, "Ultimate Weapon: Bow", but which IMDb renders as "Arrow: The Ultimate Weapon". I caught the same error in the making-of featurette, where 활 appears several times, usually translated as "arrow". I can't figure out if this is a genuine semantic shift not recorded in my dictionaries or merely sloppiness.

Afterwards, the Old Man and I speculated about such things as Confucian marriage customs (Was she really married with the ceremony incomplete?) and Joseon administrative law (The Manchus tell the Koreans they will be treated as traitors if they return after having crossed the northern border, but was this still true after Injo's surrender?). I lamented at how the female lead had been sold short, at times being depicted as more competent than her brother only to fail in a fight every single time. And I spent some quality time with not only that grammar but also my paperback history of Korea. I can't really ask for much more from a film than that.

Last night, I had plans to meet a friend for dinner--or, at least, I thought I did. After a half-hour of waiting, I checked my phone messages and found he had called the day before to cancel. Oops. ( So here's what I did instead. )