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...and why conscious attempts to make a "yaoi movie" are doomed to failure from the start. Rampant spoilerage and plot elision follow below. You have been warned.
Frozen Flower started generating a lot of hype on the usual bbs's and forums about a year ago--here was an explicitly gay romance movie to follow on the heels of King and the Clown. Flower's director was on the record saying the film was a "love story between two men."
Yeah, only not. Either those words do not mean what the director thinks they mean, or (more likely in my opinion) the screenwriters/financial backers got cold, cold feet, because they piled on the hetsex in the same self-conscious "Grrrawr! Cars and babes!" manner of college jocks who want everyone to know there's nothing--nothing--homoerotic about all that spandex and ass-smacking going on out on the playing field.
Briefly summarised, Frozen Flower is the story of a late Goryeo-era king whose homosexuality means he's unable to produce an heir, which leads Yuan to plot to replace him. The king is protected by the loyal chief of his royal guard, Hong Lim, who's been with him since childhood; they're also lovers. This point is driven home by one fairly intense scene of the two leads kissing. Anyway, the king trusts Lim so much that he asks Lim to impregnate his wife in his stead. This leads to a good half hour of really intense softcore het porn spread across six or more separate scenes. It's fairly erotic as such things go, but would have been moreso had it been what I'd come to the movie hoping to see.
Predictably, Hong and the queen fall madly in love (although it's hard to know why exactly, as the queen (who looks disturbingly like PJ Harvey) has precious little in the way of character development and we never see them interacting aside from the sex), and predictably, the king becomes jealous and orders them apart. They, predictably, do not comply and are predictably caught in flagrante; the king responds by having Hong castrated on the spot (leading to one of the movie's more improbable moments when he's not only up and walking a few days later, but able to gallop about on a horse) and the queen sequestered. Predictably, she is now pregnant with a child no one wants anymore.
Anyway, Hong's men spirit him away, the king responds by torturing and killing anyone with any connection to Hong or knowledge of his unborn "heir's" parentage; word gets back to Hong who returns to the capital, has fun singlehandedly storming the castle and eliminating the king's army and then he and the king duel each other to the death. But they don't die before the King begs Hong to tell him whether he's loved the king for even a single moment during his life. Hong tells him no, the last words the king hears before he dies. Ju Jin-mo actually turns out a damn good performance here; he is truly, visibly wounded, and there's not a whiff of ham to be had from the scene.
But most troubling from my perspective is that Hong is absolutely believable when he says he's never loved the king, and given the amount of time the movie devotes to his interactions with the queen, I could easily have believed that this was just a heterosexual romance movie with the king replacing the mother-in-law as the antagonist keeping the star crossed lovers apart, had it not been marketed otherwise.
But then the queen storms into the room as the slaughter winds down, and Hong turns his face from hers toward the king's corpse before he too kicks the bucket. The final scenes of the movie are of Gonggil and Jangsaeng reunited and frollicking through an idyllic field in the afterlife--I mean, with Hong and the King reunited and galloping through an idyllic field in the afterlife (realising the scene in a make-up painting the king presents to Hong earlier in the narrative), preceeded by a flashback in which preteen Hong promises the king he'll stay by the king's side forever. It's as if the producer thought that by sticking one fairly tame homoerotic scene in the first fifteen minutes and unapologetically aping the ending of KatC he could recreate everything that made the latter so damn good. But yaoi fen are not likely to be fooled by these blatantly pastede-on bookends to the het romance that this movie is, and viewers uncomfortable with the homoerotic elements are not going to be pleased by the way the film jettisons them in its conclusion in an attempt to win over the yaoi fen.
Anyway, these mixed signals left me curious as to how much of the plot is historical fact. The wiki article was most unforthcoming in this regard. But then I remembered the horseback painting. That, I'd seen before. I was sure of it.
And sure enough, after wracking my brain for a few days, I remembered that I'd seen it here. (Not hotlinking because hotlinking sucks, but it's the first picture under section 3, about midway down the page.) They prettified it up for the movie (queues and fu manchu beards do not play well on sex objects), but it is undeniably the painting in question. Gongmin was indeed known for his lack of a heir, his love affairs with young men (note the plural) and was killed by members of his own inner circle, which means that while the plot is not entirely fabricated, the movie is still taking a pretty big dramatic license with the historical facts--maybe that's why the king is never given a name in the movie.
And incidentally, where did I remember seeing that painting? I'd turned the page up in a completely unrelated search while writing a paper on the 通信者 (Korean embassy to Tokugawa Japan) a good nine months ago...which just further proves my theory that everything in my life relates back to fandom somehow, even if I'm not aware of it.
これで以上です。
Frozen Flower started generating a lot of hype on the usual bbs's and forums about a year ago--here was an explicitly gay romance movie to follow on the heels of King and the Clown. Flower's director was on the record saying the film was a "love story between two men."
Yeah, only not. Either those words do not mean what the director thinks they mean, or (more likely in my opinion) the screenwriters/financial backers got cold, cold feet, because they piled on the hetsex in the same self-conscious "Grrrawr! Cars and babes!" manner of college jocks who want everyone to know there's nothing--nothing--homoerotic about all that spandex and ass-smacking going on out on the playing field.
Briefly summarised, Frozen Flower is the story of a late Goryeo-era king whose homosexuality means he's unable to produce an heir, which leads Yuan to plot to replace him. The king is protected by the loyal chief of his royal guard, Hong Lim, who's been with him since childhood; they're also lovers. This point is driven home by one fairly intense scene of the two leads kissing. Anyway, the king trusts Lim so much that he asks Lim to impregnate his wife in his stead. This leads to a good half hour of really intense softcore het porn spread across six or more separate scenes. It's fairly erotic as such things go, but would have been moreso had it been what I'd come to the movie hoping to see.
Predictably, Hong and the queen fall madly in love (although it's hard to know why exactly, as the queen (who looks disturbingly like PJ Harvey) has precious little in the way of character development and we never see them interacting aside from the sex), and predictably, the king becomes jealous and orders them apart. They, predictably, do not comply and are predictably caught in flagrante; the king responds by having Hong castrated on the spot (leading to one of the movie's more improbable moments when he's not only up and walking a few days later, but able to gallop about on a horse) and the queen sequestered. Predictably, she is now pregnant with a child no one wants anymore.
Anyway, Hong's men spirit him away, the king responds by torturing and killing anyone with any connection to Hong or knowledge of his unborn "heir's" parentage; word gets back to Hong who returns to the capital, has fun singlehandedly storming the castle and eliminating the king's army and then he and the king duel each other to the death. But they don't die before the King begs Hong to tell him whether he's loved the king for even a single moment during his life. Hong tells him no, the last words the king hears before he dies. Ju Jin-mo actually turns out a damn good performance here; he is truly, visibly wounded, and there's not a whiff of ham to be had from the scene.
But most troubling from my perspective is that Hong is absolutely believable when he says he's never loved the king, and given the amount of time the movie devotes to his interactions with the queen, I could easily have believed that this was just a heterosexual romance movie with the king replacing the mother-in-law as the antagonist keeping the star crossed lovers apart, had it not been marketed otherwise.
But then the queen storms into the room as the slaughter winds down, and Hong turns his face from hers toward the king's corpse before he too kicks the bucket. The final scenes of the movie are of Gonggil and Jangsaeng reunited and frollicking through an idyllic field in the afterlife--I mean, with Hong and the King reunited and galloping through an idyllic field in the afterlife (realising the scene in a make-up painting the king presents to Hong earlier in the narrative), preceeded by a flashback in which preteen Hong promises the king he'll stay by the king's side forever. It's as if the producer thought that by sticking one fairly tame homoerotic scene in the first fifteen minutes and unapologetically aping the ending of KatC he could recreate everything that made the latter so damn good. But yaoi fen are not likely to be fooled by these blatantly pastede-on bookends to the het romance that this movie is, and viewers uncomfortable with the homoerotic elements are not going to be pleased by the way the film jettisons them in its conclusion in an attempt to win over the yaoi fen.
Anyway, these mixed signals left me curious as to how much of the plot is historical fact. The wiki article was most unforthcoming in this regard. But then I remembered the horseback painting. That, I'd seen before. I was sure of it.
And sure enough, after wracking my brain for a few days, I remembered that I'd seen it here. (Not hotlinking because hotlinking sucks, but it's the first picture under section 3, about midway down the page.) They prettified it up for the movie (queues and fu manchu beards do not play well on sex objects), but it is undeniably the painting in question. Gongmin was indeed known for his lack of a heir, his love affairs with young men (note the plural) and was killed by members of his own inner circle, which means that while the plot is not entirely fabricated, the movie is still taking a pretty big dramatic license with the historical facts--maybe that's why the king is never given a name in the movie.
And incidentally, where did I remember seeing that painting? I'd turned the page up in a completely unrelated search while writing a paper on the 通信者 (Korean embassy to Tokugawa Japan) a good nine months ago...which just further proves my theory that everything in my life relates back to fandom somehow, even if I'm not aware of it.
これで以上です。
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