David Anselmo: Actor
Review: R-Point
Sunday, April 15, 2007
R-Point
Director: Su-chang Kong
Release 2004
Su-chang Kong writes and directs a disturbing meditation on the ghosts of combat, the phantoms of war and the responsibility of the parts to the whole in the undertaking of such efforts in his Vietnam horror movie R-Point.
Deep in Vietcong territory, a French plantation sits at the center of island R-Point. Korean soldiers have gone missing there, but haunting radio calls still emanate from the jungle. Woo-seong Kam is Lieutenant Choi Tae-in, tasked with leading a platoon to R-Point to find the missing soldiers.
What they discover, however, is that R-Point is no searchable landscape but a shifting and increasingly deadly repetition of horrors past. Vietcong, American, French and Chinese deaths linger in the tall grass, the water-soaked caves and the dilapidated mansion which the Koreans explore. Dreams, encounters with a silent white-clad girl, and the sanity of comrades become uncertainties no one can resolve. Lines blur and the living begin to join the dead.
Kongs film is beautiful to look at. Cinematographer Hyeong-jing Seok captures foliage and rain in lush emeralds and steely blues. The French plantation, an actual location on a mountaintop in Cambodia, is resplendent in its disintegration and brings a setting-as-character phenomenon to R-Point similar to Danvers State Hospital in Brad Andersons Session 9.
The script, hoever, proves a structural challenge. Some of Kongs decisions serve R-Point well, and some undermine its effectiveness.
Where Kong succeeds is in his exploration of time and responsibility as a fluid medium. As far as a ghost story is concerned, R-Point is magnificent for this reason. Characters are only as solid and alive as their context, and when the soldiers travel far enough, or probe deep enough into their surroundings, they re-contextualize characters and the film adds a layer of disturbing unreality.
One example of this re-contextualization is the Koreans late night encounter with an American platoon. The sound of a helicopter thrums through the plantation. Outside, gristled and aggressive United States soldiers approach. They explain that their chopper can only fly at night, for fear of attack - and that a locker in the plantation belongs to them and should not be touched. Their message is cryptic. They dissolve back into the damp darkness. The Koreans bristle against their ham-handed instructions. Days later, the Korean soldiers discover an American helicopter crashed in the trees. The corpses inside, long decomposed, match the names of the previous nightly visitors.
Kong is also careful to keep his cast of soldiers -- other than Lt. Choi and the abrasive Sergeant Jin Chang-rok (Byung-ho Son) -- amorphous. The camera keeps them in cells of twos and threes, and even then framed and partially cloaked in darkness. This allows Kong to create the most effective trick of R-Point, slipping a member into the platoon mid-movie in such a way that both the audience and the characters are surprised to discover the anomolyous was not always with them.
This structure also robs R-Point of cohesive character arcs, however. Kongs film teeters on the edge of incomprehensibility at times because its characters are eminently interchangeable and filmed in such shadow, such soaking ambiguity that the narrative thread becomes tangled. It is an interesting attempt, but a frustrating watch.
Nonetheless, the thematic material comes clear. Whether it is the legacy of invasion and betrayal and inexplicable slaughter that soaked Vietnam from French to Chinese to American incursion, or the simple acts of dishonesty and selfishness performed by the individual in wartime (or anywhere), R-Point is a crucible into which error and wrongdoing are poured.
As a whole, the Korean squad is drawn into a web of haunting that results from the broad act of combat. They come face to face with the dead, and the drifting souls are captured in gorgeous mise-en-scene moments by Kong and Seok.
A platoon of soldiers, possibly the missing Koreans, walking away from the camera into the grass - silent torsos and heads above the swaying grass, is not only mysterious and unsettling, but solemn, beautiful and emblematic. Something about the inherent going away of the soldier into the hazy realm of conflict is captured by -- becoming the province of, in fact R-Point. 
On the individual level, simple white lies carry as much gravitas as pulling triggers or dropping bombs in R-Point. Keeping a camera meant for another soldier results in that soldiers deprivation being described on a ghost soldiers helmet. Theft of a dead girls bracelet brings the frequent sound of its little metal bells clinking in the darkness, and ultimately its owner.
R-Point spends much of its time building towards the ultimate manifestation of its hungry spirits. Its a journey worth taking for its disconnected and gradual ascent into hazy dread. Whatever its intent, it fails to bring a decisive and fully coherent vision to the screen, but Kongs time with the period and the implications of decades (if not centuries) of war death upon the spiritual nature of the place are important and relevant.
James OBrien
Cinescare Staff
R-Point, 2004
The French plantation, an actual location on a mountaintop in Cambodia, is resplendent in its disintegration and brings a setting-as-character phenomenon to R-Point similar to Danvers State Hospital in Brad Andersons Session 9.
