CANNES, France: A South Korean spy thriller premiering at Cannes Film Festival this weekend arrives at the perfect moment. "The Spy Gone North", by director Yoon Jong-bin, recounts the real-life mid-1990s story of a South Korean secret agent sent to infiltrate the North in the hope of securing intelligence on the nuclear weapon and ending up contributing to the North-South unification effort. The film was screened in the Midnight section at Cannes, the world’s largest film festival that runs until Saturday.
As last month’s summit between Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in still fresh – and since the meeting between the North Korean leader and President Donald Trump will take place next month in Singapore – The Spy Gone North supplies the right sentiment while showing the complicated knots of power play and political dynamics that affect the relations of the two countries. The film is likely to become a hit in South Korea, and since Korean films often finds their ways to Thai cinema, we can expect to see it on our shores later in the year.
Based on a true espionage case – with the codename Black Venus – The Spy Gone North is set in the 1993 when tensions on the Korean Peninsula peaked due to the North’s nuclear programme. South Korea’s intelligence unit dispatches Park Suk-young (Hwang Jung-min) to worm his way into the North Korean economic circle in order to obtain information on the nuke scheme. Officer Park takes on the disguise of a businessman and strikes up a friendship with Ri Myong-un (Lee Sung-min), the North’s trade czar based in Beijing. To get a chance to visit North Korea, Park initiates an advertising scheme which, if he pulls off, will allow South Korean products to film commercials in the North. His business proposition promises millions of dollars to the cash-starved North Korean, and soon, to his surprise, he is summoned to Pyongyang to meet none other than Dear Leader Kim Jong-il himself.
But beneath the secret is another secret, and politics runs deeper than Officer Park can initially grasp. The Spy Gone North, while straightforward in its treatment of the spy genre, captures that unique sensibility that characterizes the uneasy feeling dividing North and South Korea: Are they really enemies, or are they just the same people pushed apart by an unfortunately war and circumstances of history? What is the final purpose of the two countries – a reunification, or a prolonged state of tension that benefits politicians on both sides? To the eyes of the world, the North has always been the villain, the rogue state, the authoritarian madman, but the South, as the film shows, is also complicit in the provocation and division that existed since the 1950s.
“Western spy stories set during the Cold War are centred around conflict and competition between two ideologies,” said director Yoon. “But in the case of Korea, the two systems are made up of the same people. Korea is also the one place on earth where the Cold War still exists.”
Running at 140 minutes, The Spy Gone North moves briskly and at the end – when the fate of the real Park is explained on the screen – it doesn’t feel that long at all. South Korean films that tell the story of the conflict with the North have been done regularly in the past decade, and as evident again in this latest one, Korean filmmakers have found a formula to make an entertaining, market-friendly movies that also tackle hard history and potentially controversial topics. The Spy Gone North will get special mileage out of the real-world development, one that continues the unification effort that began in the period of the film.
"Spies need to infiltrate a nation to obtain information," said the director. "But to gain an advantage they also gradually come to see things through the eyes of the other."
