The President's Last Bang

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****

Like slapstick and belly laughs along with your bloody political assassinations?

Well, Im Sang-Soo's The President's Last Bang, a pitch-black political comedy about the unlikely bumbling murder of South Korean President Park Chung-hee, should suit your particular predilections.

Last Bang is, in turns, a queasy, confusing and riveting thing as it goes about its darkly funny business. It's a lean film, working quickly and cleanly through the narrative. Sang-Soo lays it all out a bit like a chamber piece, with the events mostly playing out at one location over the course of a single night. The first half echoes The Rules of the Game or Gosford Park, sketching the social station of those involved before leading us to the proverbial Main Event - the dinner party where President Chung-hee will be killed by the director of his own Korean CIA.

The film does a terrific job showing the various players in the drama as truly human - jealous, venal, selfish, lonely, stupid people. Even the President is portrayed as a real person as opposed to some venerated or loathsome figure. The assassination plot also seems comically unplanned, with the killer running out of the room pleading for a gun to make the final shot.

As was previously noted by David D'Arcy in a dispatch from Greencine Daily, as an American watching the film, you get the feeling that you're missing something - and you are, don't kid yourself - unless you know more than I did about the palace coup (read: nothing) coming into the movie. I would suspect that the lack of knowledge would keep the film at a distance from most audiences without a serious understanding of Korean history; it's clear that Sang-Soo didn't water it down for foreign consumption.

It was hugely controversial in its home country, with many of those involved in the aftermath still alive - his daughter Park's led Korea's center-right opposition party until resigning for a Presidential bid herself. That there was even a court decision brought by President Chung-hee's son that removed archival footage of student protests and Chung-see's funeral that initially played during the opening and closing credits, respectively, was hardly surprising.

The blank screens that replace the banned images belie the how full this movie it is, with things being hinted at and nudged toward in seemingly every shot of the film. Sang-Soo said in an interview that his intentions for the film were to summarize the 18 years of Park's rule in the 100-minute film, most of which I sadly missed, of course, but what I did understand was quite the history lesson.

See Also: The Americanization of Emily, Winter Kills, Dick.