Peeling Back the Layers of ‘Peppermint Candy’ in 4K Restoration

By Ning Chang

Peppermint Candy, Lee Chang-dong’s sophomore feature after his wildly successful debut, Green Fish, starts with the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

An idyllic picnic reunion turns into the site of tragedy when the turbulent and troubled Yongho (Sol Kyung-gu) stumbles in, wailing plaintive karaoke about heartbreak and throwing himself fully dressed into the river, kicking up silt and watching it run downstream. In the end, he climbs up onto the tracks while his former friends dance on, and shouts into an oncoming train, “I want to go back!”

So the film starts at the end. It’s a masterful character study capturing a moment of collapse, launching us into a reverse chronology of Yongho’s past and revealing more about this jaded, calcified and violent man. Lee subsumes this narrative within the broader context of societal collapse, as he excavates the past twenty years of South Korea’s autocracy. Throughout, interspersed by the quiet, rhythmic chugging of the train scouring through the countryside in reverse, Lee guides the audience to find the crossroads at which Yongho, and by extension the nation, went awry to the point where renewal only comes with self-destruction.

The image of the train conjures Marx’s metaphor of history’s locomotive and the political and economic revolutions that dog the narrative. These sweeping changes persist throughout the film, hovering in the background; there’s the unexplained practice of drunken military orders, an incoherent news broadcast, and other contextual clues about the social landscape that seep into Yongho’s personal narrative.