Cobweb - A Teia

Kim Jee-woon does not conceal his fascination with the South Korean film industry in the era of the dictatorship and its trashy productions. After a spectacular paraphrase of the Manchurian Westerns made in Korea in the 1960s and ’70s, he goes behind the scenes of the making of mystery crime drama of the 1970s. Cobweb deals with the desire of a second-tier director, who is considered to be a journeyman standing in the shadow of his late mentor, to remake a recently completed project according to his own sudden flash of creativity. The narrative intersperses behind-the-scenes peripeteias with sequences from the film itself, which mimic the theatrical acting and noirishly expressive formalistic stylisation of the time. Kim’s project unavoidably evokes Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, with which it shares – in addition to disturbingly specific parallels –  a general escapist view of the film industry as a chaotic melting pot of pragmatism, naïveté and a mythicised creative vision. Unlike Burton’s classic, however, the narrative here lacks a more coherent form. Cobweb falls apart into vaguely interconnected episodes and seems so dramaturgically random that one wants to believe that this mish-mash of the overwrought, the complacent and the literal must be some sort of deliberate meta homage. Otherwise, Kim’s new film is a surprisingly haphazard load of unfulfilled promises. And it probably really will be, taking into account that this is a production from the revived Barunson, which after years of collaboration with the distribution giant CJ Entertainment went its own way in the interest of its directors’ artistic freedom. But as we know from many similar examples from history, and paradoxically from the narrative of Cobweb itself, such fond hope for unrestrained creativity may truly be just one person’s obstinate wish and does not necessarily mean that the result will be refined and functional. (08/07/2023)