Burning (2018) Extended Thoughts
This is a Haruki Murakami adaptation. I guess this is a good spot to talk about why adapting prose stories for the screen comes with a unique set of challenges.
Prose writers use a different set of tools to convey information to an audience. For example, if you are a novelist and you need to convey two hundred years of history in a page, you might be able to. On the other hand, filmmakers canât really do this as easily without boring the audience. They donât have 1) as much leeway to ramble because of time constraints, 2) no one wants to listen to too much narration or read a long-ass text crawl (unless youâre George Lucas).
Murakami, like plenty of writers, makes use of internal monologues to both show, and tell us information about his characters/world. For example, in Norwegian Wood, Watanabe shows us how much of an irresponsible jackass he is by constantly rationalizing his insane behavior, and at the same time, provides useful exposition with his thoughts. If you were adapting a Norwegian Wood type story as a filmmaker, this might naturally lead you to write internal monologues via narration -- which you can do to a certain extent. The most successfully Iâve seen this done is in Wong Kar-Waiâs work and (SOME) of Terrence Malickâs work. They both mix internal monologues with visual storytelling so the audience doesnât start noticing how much theyâre relying on narration.
But the two adaptations of Murakami, Burning and Norwegian Wood, donât take this route. Instead, they opt for trying to convey internal feelings through visual storytelling (oh boy), which places a lot of the burden of actually creating the story on the actors. The reason why is that Lee Chang-dong and Tran Ahn Hung were probably aiming to capture the âmood,â or âtoneâ of Murakami more so than the details. This suits Lee Chang-dong in Burning because he transplants the story from Japan to Seoul/Paju. However, it also means that whatever dialogue Murakami does write in (and heâs not particularly wordy with his characters, again, preferring to mix internal monologues in rather than hearing them speak), is really sparse. This puts a lot of pressure on actors to convey character development through facial expression and body language.
I donât know if Iâve made it clear, but this is a problem for filmmakers adapting prose, right? Because filmmakers have to show things, and Murakami stories, PUT SIMPLY, have: 1) characters who convey information and feeling through internal monologues, which rely on prose and arenât conveyable through images, 2) not much dialogue, 3) and as a result, really thin plots. That last bit is important in thinking of adapting stories with lots of internal struggle -- these internal struggles occupy a lot of the text on the page. Theyâre the meat of what the prose writer is exploring -- and Murakami is one of those writers who does it well. But when you remove this element (internal monologues) that imbue the story with its mood and meaning, you need to replace it with something big: give us more dialogue, or tell us more about the characters, or give it a plot.
The last one is what Lee Chang-dong chose to do. He probably knew that the short story idea wasnât enough to fuel a feature film, so he had to genre-fy it a bit as a thriller. At the same time, Lee Chang-dong still wanted to capture the mood of Murakami -- so he kept dialogue to a minimum -- PROBLEM! Thrillers need exposition. You donât have to stop every five minutes to hold the audienceâs hand, but you do need to be clear on 1) whatâs going on in the plot, 2) or intentionally mislead them, and then show them you misled them.
And aye, there's the rub of Burning. Because of all the aforementioned problems in adaptation, and (what I see) as Lee Chang-dongâs vision for the film, he ended up with a lot of competing desires that weakened the overall product.
Lee wants to be arthouse subtle, but thrillers need (relatively) clear plots. You can make an arthouse thriller (e.g. Rosemaryâs Baby), itâs definitely possible, but they all too often veer towards over-obfuscation in an attempt to be smart. Possible Solution: Give us more exposition. Have the protagonist have an ally who he can discuss the plot with, etc.
Lee wants to adapt Murakamiâs tone, but Murakamiâs reliance on prose-writerly tools basically makes this impossible. Possible Solution: Use narration, or make the characters talk more. Lee can still focus on getting long-takes of the natural environment while having his characters speak. Thatâs a way of doing things.
Furthermore, this is more of a critique of Murakami than it is Lee: but Burning is really old-hat in terms of Murakamiâs work (Iâm aware it was written in the 90s). It has every damn trope of Murakamiâs that heâs revisited a billion times -- sensitive young man, quirky and hyper-sexual woman, they have sex, she disappears, there are cat(s) everywhere, people miscommunicate, and the sensitive young man is left in despair. You can see this in Dance, Dance, Dance, Norwegian Wood, After Dark, South of the BorderâŠ, and almost all of his short stories.  Â
Again, when Murakami does this right, people frickenâ worship him (see: Norwegian Wood, where both Midori and Naoko feel real and motivate conflict with Watanabe). When Murakami does this wrong, people rightly point to his female characters as blindly embodying menâs worst thoughts of what women are: stupid, flippant, irrational actors who flaunt morality in favor of casual sex. This is how Haemi is written, and why you end up not really caring when she disappears. She doesnât feel real! I know this is more Leeâs responsibility because Haemi is his character, but Murakami often does this in his stories, and combined with Leeâs penchant for hyper-focusing his camera on Haemi and making her get naked (again, I have no problem with sex in film, in fact I think there should be more of it, but you canât do this and also write the character this badly), the amount of cringe intensified over the course of my viewing.
What ends up happening by the end of the film, because of all of the aforementioned problems, is that you only realize what Lee was trying to do in the last thirty seconds. [SPOILER ALERT] Itâs highly implied that Yeunâs character, Ben, is a serial killer who murdered Haemi, though Lee allows you to wonder whether Yooâs character is just a nutso incel. OK, but itâs clear that Lee wanted you to question the protagonistâs sanity throughout the story, not just at the end -- meaning, he failed to communicate that thatâs what the plot is about from the beginning.
 Burning isnât bad. Itâs a directorially strong film, with great performances from the trio of Yoo Ah In, Steven Yuen, and Jeong Jong Seo. However, the story is basically a 2.5 hour exercise in anti-climactic writing. Everything feels like a glancing blow at what this story could have been. Not because the itâs incomprehensible or audiences donât have the patience for slow storytelling, but because if Lee Chang-dong had figure out a way to do a little more exposition, Burning would have gone from a decent, arthouse effort to something on par with Na Hong-jinâs horror masterpiece Gok-seong.
P.S. Notes: Itâs interesting to me that Steven Yeun is always cast as a 1) supporting character who 2) betrays the lead. In Sorry to Bother You, he plays a political activist who sleeps with the protagonistâs love interest. In Okja, he plays a gyopo political activist who betrays the movement. In Burning, he plays an evil gyopo whoâs there to bang your  girlfriend and make you feel lame. Iâd like someone to dissect if maybe this is endemic to how the world views Asian-American men (friendly faces who end up being interlopers / the Korean-Korean view on Korean-American men), or itâs just Steven Yeun being typecast.
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