Radio Star: "Can we still be friends?"

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Category: Reviews

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... and I thought I was just going to watch yet another melodrama. On so many levels, Lee Joon-Ik's post-King and the Clown project looked like an exercise in minor mode: an absurdly small budget (especially considering the 12 million admissions gathered by its predecessor), no hallyu pop stars in the cast, nothing likely to become the talk of the town. After the tremendous success of his surprise-hit historical drama, it seemed disconcerting, to say the least, that the director should choose such a curious theme for his latest story: failure - for the most part. This was even more surprising a change of direction than the switch from Once Upon a Time in the Battlefield (2003) to his King and The Clown (2005), after which Chungmuro (the quarter where Korean film production companies have taken up residence, and whose name is frequently used as a metonymy for the Korean cinema industry) was eagerly (jealously?) waiting.

There is nothing immediately outstanding about Radio Star, but the sum of its qualities (all of which are very subtle) transforms the film into an ineffably moving piece, particularly resilient to the grasp of commentary.

It is sometimes much more difficult to speak about a film that one likes than a film that one hates. With the latter, the temptation to yield to a kind of iconoclastic joy is a strong one, not often resisted. Much satisfaction can be derived from panning somebody else's work, be it a film, a book, or any artistic piece for that matter. On the other hand, what is there to be said about a film that one likes, apart from a banal “I like it”? Radio Star is very revealing, in this respect.

Lee Joon-Ik's melodrama reminds us that it is more important to try to understand what is offered than to judge. This reminder has certainly a lot to do with the subdued performances of Park Joong-Hoon and Ahn Sung-Ki, a pair of veteran actors whose talent, once again, was given due recognition at the 2006 Blue Dragon Awards ceremony.

Unaffected by their generation gap, they have always demonstrated exceptional on-screen chemistry in three films that superbly marked the history of Korean cinema: Chilsu & Mansu (1988), Two Cops (1993) and Nowhere To Hide (1999). Seven years after Lee Myung-Se's UFO (unindentified film object, if I may call it that), the pair has reunited to give life to an unusual friendship story between a washed-out rockstar, Choi Gon (Park), and his manager Park Min-Soo (Ahn). Choi has known fleeting but intense moments of fame and glory, shown in the opening sequence., but this is not the story we are going to be told here. Without transition, the film takes us to a bleak present, 15 years later, a time when things have changed in a rather dismal way. The singer has aged... just a tad. But his music has now completely grown out of fashion and he now has to content himself with providing background live music for cafés and restaurants. In a nutshell, Choi Gon is a has-been. His sycophantic but selfless manager spends most his time patching up drunk driving incidents, old drug-involving scandals and generally bad behavior-related problems, for which he frequently volunteers to take the blame. A modern-day Pylades, Min-Soo sticks to his bad-tempered friend through thick and thin, going as far as neglecting his wife and child.

Out of luck, out of ideas, and short of cash, the only way out for Choi Gon is to become a radio DJ in the small provincial town of Yongwol. Hardly a respectable option for the singer, his career seems to have reached rock-bottom for good, with this lowly job in a small station that is about to close doors within three months into the bargain. However, despite his exile from Seoul, from music itself (last but not least humiliation: he has to play the music of others, while he is relegated behind the “real” scene), Choi actually finds in the very banishing/vanishing of his own songs a way to give new life to his voice, and to himself. In other words, this is the beginning of generosity for him: by giving center stage to ordinary people (what MTV would call “real people”, whatever the expression means, these days), by letting them speak in their own voices, the singer reinvents himself as a host, in the strongest sense of the word. With a little help from his friends, manager Park, and producer Kang (also in “exile”), the improvised radio DJ grants a voice to a community that finds itself redefined and revived, channeled through the unity of a shared program, to the point that the whole town of Yongwol seems to become a character of its own.

Choi Seok-Hwan's script and Lee Joon-Ik's rock-solid storytelling brilliantly translates this new-found unity. But it is the central performances of Park Joong-Hoon and Ahn Sung-Ki, who compose very likeable, compelling characters, which constitute the leading thread of the film. It is their relation that is the true core/corps (body) of the story, and is the link between The King and the Clown and Radio Star. Friendship is indeed the main form of emotional investment in both works (this is true in a number of other Korean films as well), instead of romantic or sexual love. It is the paramount and most exclusive passion, whose making and/or breaking is the very matter of the movie.