Жасыл нан (Жасыл тісше)

1999 film directed by Lee Chang Dong
the food item

Peppermint Candy is a 1999 South Korean drama film by Lee Chang dong, his second. The film opens with the implied suicide of the protagonist and uses reverse chronology to depict some of the key events of the past 20 years of his life that led to this point. It was the ninth highest grossing domestic film of 2000 with 311,000 admissions in Seoul. It was well received, especially at film festivals. Spurred by the success of Lee Chang dong's directorial debut, Green Fish, Peppermint Candy was chosen as the opening film for the Busan International Film Festival in its first showing in 1999. It won multiple awards at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and won the Grand Bell Awards for best film of 2000.

The film is divided into 7 sections, each dated and titled. They are presented in the order in which they are presented in the film. Each section is preceded by a 10 to 15 second long shot from the top of a train as it heads out of a tunnel towards mountains, with variations.

A group of friends have gathered by a river for a picnic for the first time in 20 years. A middle aged Korean man named Kim Young ho wanders to the group; the members have not heard from him in many years and have limited knowledge of his past 20 years. After causing general mayhem with his deranged antics, he leaves and climbs atop a nearby train track; one of his friends tries to convince him to abandon suicide, but the others ignore him and dance. Facing an oncoming train, he exclaims "I want to go back again!" in a freeze frame.

While driving, Young ho hears on the radio about a member of the group announcing their imminent reunion. He spends the last of his money on a pistol and contemplates whom he should kill while he takes his own life. After confronting his former business partner and ex wife Hong ja, the husband of his old flame Sun im pays him a surprise visit. Young ho is taken to visit a comatose Sun im in a hospital, and presents her some peppermint candies that she used to give him while he was in the military. A tear trickles down Sun im's face. Before parting, Sun im's husband gives Young ho an old manual camera. He sells it nevertheless.

At first glance, Young ho appears to be a rather successful businessman, but the problems in his life become clear when he confronts his wife, who is having an affair with her driving instructor. Young ho is unable to claim moral high ground, since he is also shown having an affair with an assistant from work. After having sex with his assistant, Young ho dines with her and coincidentally encounters a man he has not seen in years. Young ho tells him that he quit the police force two years ago. In an awkward bathroom exchange, Young ho asks the man if life is beautiful; he agrees. Finally, Young ho is shown with his wife and daughter at their new house, eating with his colleagues. As Hong ja's grace becomes a bawl, Young ho storms out of the house.

Young ho is a police officer, and his wife is about to deliver their daughter. While getting a haircut, he encounters the man he later meets at the restaurant, apprehends him, and brutally tortures him for information about another man's whereabouts. This leads Young ho to Kunsan, coincidentally Sun im's hometown. There, he and his fellow police officers capture the wanted man. While his fellow police officers wait to catch the man in question, Young ho fruitlessly searches for Sun im and instead ends up on a one night stand with a woman. The next morning, they catch the man and return to the police station. The woman Young ho had a one night stand with fruitlessly waits for him.

Young ho is just starting as a policeman and is pressured by his peers to torture a crime suspect, presumably a student demonstrator. Hong ja, then a restaurant owner, takes an interest in him. One day, Young ho is visited by Sun im. She tells him how she had visited him while he was in the military, but was denied a chance to meet him, and gives him a camera he had, reminding him how he always wanted to become a photographer. He coldly and cruelly dismisses her by feigning interest in Hong ja and returns the camera to Sun im as she leaves by train. One night, a deranged Young ho barks military commands at the patrons of Hong ja's restaurant and wreaks havoc. Later, Young ho is shown sleeping with Hong ja, who tries to show him how to pray.

While Sun im is trying to visit Young ho while he is performing his mandatory military service, his company is ordered to quell the Gwangju Democratization Movement and she doesn't get a chance to be with him. Young ho gets shot, presumably by friendly fire, in the leg and stays behind. While waiting for help, a harmless and presumably innocent student approaches him, pleading to be allowed to go home despite violating enforced curfew; standing in the darkness, he initially misconstrues her as Sun im. Just as he is about to let her off, soldiers arrive. Not wanting his comrades to realize he had let a civilian go, he fires randomly, hoping to fool the soldiers into believing he is doing his duty, but accidentally shoots and kills the girl. As the other soldiers gather around, he embraces her and bawls.

Young ho is a part of the student group gathering at the same river for a picnic, and there, he meets Sun im, at the time packing peppermint candies for a factory, for the first time. He expresses a clear interest in photography and her, and tells her that while he'd never been at that river before, he had seemingly seen the location in his dreams. While the others gather around to sing, Young ho wanders off, lies down on the river bank, and stares up at the sky. As the sound of a passing train is heard, a tear trickles out of an eye and the frame freezes.

The events of Yong ho's life that are shown in the movie can be seen as representing some of the major events of Korea's recent history. The student demonstrations of the early 1980s leading to the Gwangju massacre are shown, as Yong ho becomes traumatized by the shooting incident. The tightening grip on the country by the military government during the 1980s is mirrored by Yong ho losing his innocence and becoming more and more cynical during his stint as a brutal policeman. Similarly, Yong ho losing his job during the late 1990s mirrors the Asian financial crisis. Yong ho's life represents the struggle between historiography and psychoanalysis. Despite his desperate desire to move on from his past, mnemonic traces overpower the psychoanalytical aspects of his life. These mnemonic traces include the train, the camera, and the peppermint candy as well as Sun im and her surrogates throughout the vignettes, which led the psychoanalysis of his life to triumph over historiography. The relationship between historiography and psychoanalysis can be seen in historicism and progressivism, where Yong ho chooses to look back on his past instead of looking solely at his future to move forward. The major traumatic events that were historically imposed on him were so embedded in his life that he could not simply move on. However, finally reflecting back on his past allows him to accept what happened and finally advance into the future. Unfortunately, this was moments before he committed suicide when he turned to face the train. The train is the symbol that guides the film in reverse chronology, and his cry to return to the past signifies his tragically late recognition of the past's significance for his life. Issues of masculinity in South Korean culture arise in the film. Yong Ho's masculinity is broken during the Gwangju Massacre scene in which the militarized masculinity enforced by the Korean government — a required 26 month duty in the military, an order to kill innocent civilians, and a need to conform to the standards of the other soldiers around him — ultimately force Yong Ho to compensate later in life by interrogating the student protesters who inevitably were the reason he was put in that situation. This theme continues with the way he treats women later on in his life, objectifying and mistreating his wife Hong ja and ultimately losing his one link back to his innocence, Sun im. What results in the beginning of the film, which will be the end of Yong Ho's life, is an ultimate humiliation and a lamentation for a lost innocence where personal history is connected with the history of South Korea.