Fascinating tragicomedy – ‘Under’ tries to portray perfect family life in Pyongyang

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LOS ANGELES, June 20, (RTRS): Propaganda is one of the least universal modes of communication, and one almost feels a tiny sympathy for the North Korean authorities naive enough to think veteran Russian documentarian Vitaly Mansky would tow the designated party line with “Under the Sun.” But instead, the invited guest filmmaker ruthlessly mocks and undermines their intentions by simply revealing the heavily scripted artifice imposed upon this supposed look at average (but exemplary!) family life in Pyongyang. The result is an awkwardly revealing act of subversion that is arresting however you take it: as propaganda deconstructed, failed or turned into a tragicomedy whose most stinging indictments lie mostly in what remains unseen.

This fascinating curiosity — now destined to play everywhere except its subject nation, which has reportedly already tried suppressing its exposure — is beginning to open theatrically in various territories amidst a long festival run. Icarus Films’ US release kicks off July 6 at NYC’s Film Forum, with Los Angeles and other markets following. While Mansky deploys on-screen text sparingly (and no narration at all), an opening title card gives up this multinational co-production “documentary’s” game in characteristically deadpan fashion: “The script of this fi lm was assigned to us by the North Korean side. They also kindly provided us with a round-the-clock escort service, chose our fi lming locations and looked over all the footage we shot to make sure we did not make any mistakes in showing the life of a perfectly ordinary family in the best country in the world.”

Gratitude

Our no doubt carefully vetted heroine is Zin-mi, an eight-yearold Pyongyang resident who can scarcely open her mouth without some pearl of nationalistic pride or gratitude toward the Great Comrade leaping out, as if spring-loaded. She and her parents live in a clean, bright, spacious apartment, with an apparently everyday dinner quite the sumptuous spread. Dad is an engineer at an exemplary garment factory, mom a cheerful worker at an exemplary soy-milk plant. The narrative, such as it is, revolves around Zin-mi’s joining of the Children’s Union, a gala event for the family that falls on the Day of the Shining Star, aka Kim Jong-Il’s birthday. This last part is true, insofar as Zin-Mi is indeed taken into the Children’s Union for the film’s purposes. That as well as the late Great Leader’s birthday occasion all kinds of public spectacle (from speeches to a mightily kitschy climactic youth ballet/variety show).

But nearly everything else here is questionable, because Mansky keeps the camera running between “takes” to show his Korean minder/manager feeding the subjects lines, or endlessly exhorting them to greater heights of gushing patriotic “joy.” We eventually glean from that figure’s instructions that the family’s apartment isn’t their real abode. Later titles inform that the parents have likewise been “reassigned” different professions from their actual ones in order to show off preferred industrial locations. It’s not hard to detect an undercurrent of acute performance anxiety in these ordinary citizens (they don’t seem to be professional actors) called upon to portray “Up With People” versions of themselves in numbing take after take. Occasionally we catch a glimpse of unstaged real life among citizens bicycling home from work, or riding the subway — though they invariably seem uneasy finding a camera pointed at them.

But mostly everything is scripted and choreographed to a tee, whether in the revisionist historical dogma a teacher spouts repetitiously in the classroom or the rallies, memorials, parades and other public activities that seemingly fi ll every waking hour in this cold grey cement capitol. One thing that can’t entirely be scripted is an eight-year-old girl’s emotions. There are several moments when the stress and exhaustion of playing what’s basically a demanding fi ctional lead role reduce Zin-Mi to tears — which of course, it was assumed would be left on the cutting room fl oor. While at about the twothirds mark, “Under the Sun” begins to seem a bit attenuated, its obvious (if only implied) points already made, the ending is a stunner: Asked to think of something cheerful to calm herself, this little pawn of the state’s response inadvertently underlines the grotesquerie and pathos of an imagination entirely shaped by totalitarianism.

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