The Enduring Bitterness of Peppermint Candy (I)

By Hannah Kang Wolter

Peppermint Candy Poster (Image via IMDb)

While South-Korean director Lee Chang Dong might be best known in the West for Burning, winner of the FIREPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 2018, his over twenty-year-long career has been marked by an uninterrupted tide of nominations and awards. Among his astonishing oeuvre is the drama Peppermint Candy, Lee’s second film, which employs reverse chronology to retrace the events in the life of Kim Young-ho, a middle-aged, ex-businessman, in the latter half of the twentieth century. The film is suffused with a profound melancholy, a nostalgia and regret so deep and harrowing that it almost drives one insane - as is the case for Young-ho. Yet Peppermint Candy is not merely the excruciating story of the loss of innocence and disillusionment of an individual; it is also a tale that explores the abusive structures that underlie and perpetuate South Korea’s strict social hierarchy. 

The opening scene of the film takes place in the spring of 1999, where we meet the protagonist, Kim Young-ho, lying on his back beneath an overhead railway. He lurches into the midst of a band of middle-aged people picnicking by a river, who, once over their initial bewilderment, recognise him as their former classmate and invite him for a drink. Yet his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic; he flails into the river, overcome with some unnameable emotion, before climbing onto the nearby tracks. He is deaf to the half-hearted appeals of the group to come down, most of whom dismiss the possibility that he will actually commit suicide. While his ex-classmates continue their party, dancing to the nostalgic tunes of their youth, Young-ho wails unintelligibly upon the rails until a deep bellow heralds an oncoming train: as it bears down upon him, he turns to face it, throwing his arms wide and shouting, “I want to go back…” The frame freezes upon Young-ho’s face, grotesque and distorted with emotion, to be replaced by a shot of a train moving backwards, into the past.  

The film takes us through seven episodes from Young-ho’s life, the first of which takes place three days prior. We follow him as he purchases a gun, with what transpires to be the remainder of his money, and fantasises killing himself as he sits in his car. His life is disjointed, without meaning: his desperation drives him to the doorstep of his ex-wife, and when he receives no pity from her through the still-chained door, he slumps to the ground to gain the affection of her dog: the only creature who seems to bear him any sympathy. When he returns home - a leaking, plastic greenhouse located in the lower realms of the city - he finds a well-dressed stranger waiting for him, who informs him that he is the husband of Sunim, the sweetheart of Young-ho’s youth. The following day, dressed in clothes that her husband has bought for him, Young-ho visits the dying Sunim in hospital, bringing with him a box of peppermint candy. At her bedside, Young-ho addresses the unconscious, middle-aged figure, asking her if she still remembers the sweets she sent him during his time in the military. He tells her that he had saved each one she had sent him in her letters, and holds one up with a shaking hand to demonstrate how they are unchanged, as white and sweet as they have always been. The peppermint candy which lends its name to the film represents a bygone time in Young-ho’s life: they are symbolic of his innocence and youthful sensitivity, of a time free of cynicism and regret, and their enduringly perfect appearance serves only to contrast with his own painful degradation. When Young-ho leaves the hospital, his gait is marred by a previously absent limp; as he hobbles down the stairs, Sunim’s husband calls after him, presenting him with a camera which Sunim had apparently been keeping for him for the last twenty years. That evening, after selling the camera, Young-ho sits by a railway, drinking and unravelling the roll of film which had been found within it. A train whistles by, evoking the rush of memories which confront him, and the scene cuts to the montage of a train’s journey in reverse, towards an earlier episode in Young-ho’s life in the summer of 1994. 

Scene from Peppermint Candy (Image via Hancinema.net)

As we continue to travel back into Young-ho’s past, we witness his transformation - or rather, his regression - from misery to cruelty, perpetrator to victim, complicity to innocence. If the Young-ho of the present, miserable and destitute as he is, elicits our pity (if not our distaste), then the figure of Young-ho as a bullying, abusive husband and cruel police officer stirs up something akin to hatred. We see him abuse his wife for her infidelity while committing his own illicit affairs and watch him torture students protesting for democracy as part of a day’s work. Yet as we retreat further into the past, this portrait of a seemingly inherently cruel Young-ho is dismantled: his callousness and ravaged morals are revealed to be the result of years of unresolved trauma and abuse. We discover that his limp is the product of a particularly harrowing experience, his loss of innocence manifested as a literal wound that reappears at intense moments of disillusionment. The camera, too, is a gift from Sunim that symbolises his youthful idealism: that he sells it without hesitation at the beginning of the film demonstrates the extent to which he has lost all hope of redemption.

 Peppermint Candy is a drawn out tale of dramatic irony of the most painful kind. Unlike other stories, in which the audience might have some knowledge of concurrent events of which the protagonist is unaware, viewers of Peppermint Candy watch the unfolding of Young-ho’s life in reverse with full knowledge of what awaits him in the future: thus the more we despise the figure of the amoral, bullying man that he is in middle-age, the more our hearts bleed for the sensitive youth who once dreamt of becoming a photographer. Throughout the entirety of the film, there is not a moment of uncompromised, unadulterated happiness. Even the first flushes of youthful love between Sunim and Young-ho are overlain with tragedy, for we have already seen the mangled hopes that litter their future. The final scene of the film depicts their first meeting, twenty years earlier, at the very same site of the picnic at the film’s opening: the episode is suffused with an acute sense of deja vu, a feeling heightened by Young-ho’s impossibly poignant confession to Sunim that the setting feels strangely familiar to him, despite his never having been there before. The film closes as it begun, with a shot of Young-ho lying supine underneath the raised tracks, leaving us with the uncanny feeling that this scene from the past is haunted by the ghosts of the future.