A Dazzling ‘Green Fish’ Starts Series

UC Irvine plays host to “Post-Colonial Classics of Korean Cinema,” a unique series of 20 key films spanning the 1950s to the present.

The series, which resumes in January and runs through March, opens tonight with the screening of the rousing new contemporary epic “Green Fish,” which marks the smashing directorial debut of world-class screenwriter Chang-dong Lee.

He is best known for his scripts for Kwang-Su Park’s 1995 “A Single Spark,” a grueling but impassioned and greatly accomplished account of a labor activist, and 1994’s “To the Starry Island,” a beautifully wrought tale of betrayal and reconciliation, a legacy of the Korean War.

Lee brings the same broad scope to “Green Fish,” in which a young soldier (Suk-Kyu Han)--returning home after completing military service--has his entire life changed when he sticks his head out from a moving train and catches a pink chiffon scarf on his face. It belongs to a beautiful nightclub singer (Hye-Jin Shim) who will ultimately draw the soldier into the savage Seoul underworld.

“Green Fish” is “Rocco and His Brothers” in reverse; instead of a widow and her sons moving to the big city in search of a better life only to be faced with disintegration and corruption, this film’s widow and her family home faces encroachment from expanding Seoul suburbs.

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The soldier gets sucked into dark, destructive forces in his simple yearning to make enough money to launch a restaurant adjacent to his mother’s home that will once again reunite his fragmented family. Lee has the great gift of being able to combine a blistering social conscience with a formidable talent for screen storytelling. As a gangster movie, “Green Fish” is as bravura and compelling as any in the genre.

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* “Green Fish” screens tonight in the Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100, near Campus Drive and West Peltason Road, UC Irvine. 8 p.m. $4-$6. Part of the “Post-Colonial Classics of Korean Cinema” film series, which resumes in January and continues through March. (714) 824-2227.