Review: The Lovers and the Despot (2016)
In 1978, North Korean dictator-to-be Kim Jong-Il kidnapped South Korea’s most famous director, Shin Sang-ok, and his former wife, starlet Choi Eun-hee, in order to set them up as propagandist filmmakers for the communist republic. As his prisoners in North Korea, he gave them the means to make countless films all the while bolstering the notion that he was a great artist in addition to a great leader.
Ross Adam and Robert Cannan’s The Lovers and the Despot tells one of the strangest and most fascinating stories in international cinema history. Sadly, the film doesn’t live up to the absurd promise of its real-life material. Shin and Choi are important figures in Korean cinema even before taking into account their bizarre ordeals in North Korea. It would be easy to justify a feature length documentary exploring only their filmmaking. Combining this influence on the national cinema with their eight years beneath the sway of Kim Jong-Il only makes their story more important and more fascinating. They’re great artists who lived a story wilder than the films they imagined on the screen.
So why is The Lovers and the Despot so dull? Most of this is due to the film’s standard-fare filmmaking. Full of talking heads, archival footage sans context, and historical generalizations about Kim Jong-Il and the People’s Republic, the film never relishes the bizarreness of the story it tells. Nor does it explore many of the fascinating themes natural to the material, such as Shin’s deal with the devil in being able to make films without economic restriction so long as they support an evil regime. In fact, the film shows little interest in Shin and Choi’s filmmaking as a whole. It only sees them as individuals caught up in a bizarre case with the world’s most elusive nation, as opposed to great artists compromised by their own talent.
The Lovers and the Despot satisfies on only the most expository level. It makes you wish a documentarian like Werner Herzog or Errol Morris got hold of the material and really played its insanity for all its worth.
4 out of 10
The Lovers and the Despot (2016, UK)
Written and directed by Robert Cannan and Ross Adam.