“In the end, they swallowed up the nation as a whole.” The last lines of the epilogue intertitle of Kim Sung-soo’s 12:12: The Day roll on top of a faded, real black-and-white photo of the men behind the South Korean military coup d’état of December 12. The spotty and sickly monochrome image inserts the film’s events into both reality and the past — a distant past that can only be remembered without color. Of course, 1979 wasn’t that long ago and color photography had been around for several decades (even if it wasn’t the norm for photojournalism), and we know precisely the hues of general Chun Doo-hwan’s skin. Even the men enacting the coup are slightly removed from reality: Hwang Jung-min plays Chun Doo-gwang, not Chun Doo-hwan; Jung Woo-sung is Lee Tae-shin rather than Jang Tae-wan; the list could go on. The point of 12:12: The Day seems to be not to rehash the historical happenings of the fateful day, but to supplicate an image of the soul of Seoul as a resilient, brave, and honorable city with a population that fights for each other.
12:12: The Day begins with the news of the assassination of dictator president Park Chung-hee and a declaration from the bad guys that “the world is the same” as it was before, a comment that leans into viewers’ historical knowledge of what will happen: Major General Chun Doo-hwan will successfully stage a military coup and hold control of the lower half of the peninsula until 1988; his dictatorship will in short time lead to the Gwangju Uprising (a favorite democratic movement of Korean cinema (A Taxi Driver, 1987: When the Day Comes, & even the film that began the Korean New Wave in Peppermint Candy); and his tyranny will ultimately inspire the final push for a full democracy in South Korea. Kim’s film traces the change of the world as a line of continuity through President Park’s assassination and President Chun’s 1987 concession and to the democratic end that South Korea now enjoys. Brilliantly, he alludes to this in what might be the film’s lone shot of a civilian mass, one of cinema’s longest, strongest symbols of democracy, as the title card imprints. The bright sun grants the faces of the crowd anonymity, and through the anonymity, guides the viewer to see themselves in the crowd and see the Seoul of today as emerging from the political war that follows the title card.
Hwang is excellent as future President Chun. With a haircut seemingly inspired by Bad Ape from War for the Planet of the Apes and the mischievous smile of a youngest sibling, he plays the role with the right amount of wile and presumption to make the viewer despise the president and understand his chicanery without imbuing him with any charisma to succumb to. (No slander meant against Bad Ape.) Jung is likewise fantastic in his role, imbuing Lee with the professionalism and distinction of a leader worth following even when the odds aren’t in their favor. His commitment to an ideological cause of an apolitical military feels refreshing in a global cinema where protagonists can’t escape political allegiances. The film also feels globally relevant right now. Earlier this month, former President Trump narrowly avoided assassination, and an American Civil War hasn’t been too difficult to imagine for almost any American in a swing state for quite some time now. The political loyalties of a military’s generals, like it or not, are likely the difference between a coup d’état and democratic continuity.
One of 12:12’s most exciting scenes is a game of phone tag, with both sides searching for the missing Minister of Defense. The military is in utter chaos, and his signature leaves behind a regime-saving currency with the ink. Kim Jee-woon’s frequent DP Lee Mo-gae (I Saw the Devil, The Good, the Bad, the Weird) employs split-screen on a few occasions, in addition to the fast-paced cutting of Korea’s greatest editor Kim Sang-bum (Oldboy, The Handmaiden, The Attorney, Decision to Leave), to augment the chaos of the moment and make it impossible for the viewer to fully track everything. Phone tag has simply never been this suffused with adrenaline — and it probably won’t be again for quite some time: it takes a filmmaking crew as skilled as this one to unlock that potential.
Kim’s most notable previous film was 2013’s quasi-isolationist The Flu, and, regardless of whatever the director’s real-life politics are, it’s fairly easy to construct a politically conservative image of the filmmaker from just these two films. The image of Lee Tae-shin playing chicken with the entire 2nd Airborne on the bridge about to enter Seoul is the stuff of right-wing fever dreams: the good guy with the gun standing up to the bad guy with the gun. It’s never clear if Lee is actually a good guy with a gun or just a principled military general committed to an apolitical military; after all, he did serve the dictator President Park for a decade and a half. Regardless of the political implication, however, the lone wolf putting his body between an entire brigade of tanks and armored cars and the city of Seoul will rouse even the most ideologically ambivalent of viewers. It’s a great non-action action scene. The film’s runner-up for best sequence, the climax, offers another armed face-off where neither side ends up firing out of fear of starting a civil war where the Korean people will pay the consequences (and also out of a fear of an invasion from the North). 12:12’s “action” scenes, then, bear the tension of real action confrontations, but very little in the way of actual violence. The threat of escalation keeps fingers off triggers — though Lee does everything he can, including briefly taking Chun in his pistol’s crosshairs before dropping the gun, to prevent the rise of a dictator. Somewhere in the film’s established middle ground between prevention and hesitancy, Kim makes the rebellious apolitical general into a hero, which is fully a testament to his superb direction. On paper, Lee scans as a coward. On screen, he’s a legendary precursor to democracy.
Published as part of NYAFF 2024.
