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I don’t like running. It hurts by legs. Makes my chest ache and embarrasses me in public. So with that in mind I sat at home and watched other much faster men run very quickly.

Produced last year for the American TV series 30 for 30 and shown on the BBC earlier this year, 9.79* received a small cinematic release to coincide with the 25th anniversary of its events. Them events involving the Seoul 1988 Olympics which saw American hero Carl Lewis battle Canadian upstart Ben Johnson for gold in the 100 meters. In a massive upset Johnson claimed the medal. Three days later though Johnson was very publicly stripped off the title when he failed a drugs test. Imagine if you will the scandal that befell John Candy in Cool Runnings and you’re half way to realising the shit-storm of controversy at work here.

Director Daniel Gordon scores the impressive feet of assembling all the runners who took part in the race along with trainers. A couple of folk are no longer on this mortal coil so don’t get to have their say. The main person being the doctor who prescribed athletes with performance enhancing drugs. Almost surprisingly Johnson himself turns up, whilst never fully explaining or apologising for his actions. Then again the reasons are obvious and the time for apologies have probably past. He comes across as stoic to the point of boredom. Carl Lewis comes across as much more jovial (read; smug), sat comfortably in the knowledge that in his prime he could trounce anyone who wasn’t using performance enhancers. Plus for me growing up in the late 80s/early 90s it’s always nostalgic to see Linford Christie.

The film tracks the training processes of each of the key athletes, the event itself and the impact the drugs scandal had on the sport. Johnson’s transformation from struggling wannabee to Carl Lewis’ villainous rival is an intriguing proposition and  whilst an interesting subject overall the film is documented with the dryness of a cracker. This is despite the constant uses of bombastic music to try and heighten the tension, much like a US episode of Hell’s Kitchen. Someone dropped something…. BOOOOOOMMMM! There’s also a fantastic epilogue to the proceedings where it reveals that pretty much all of the god-like Olympians where taking performance enhancing drugs at some point which goes to show that if you want to get somewhere faster, cheat. And in case you were wondering the asterix in the title indicates the disputed time. Fascinating is it not?

By Gordon Foote.

Carrying on from Land of Hope, I have another Eastern film on the block this week.  Moving from Japan to South Korea, we have Nugu-ui ttal-do anin Haewon, or Nobody’s Daughter Haewon for those, like myself, whose only prior exposure to the Korean vernacular came courtesy of Psy and his delightful wee tune…

Nobody’s Daughter Haewon tells the straightforward story of a drama student and her professor as they continue an on/off relationship and… yeah, that’s kind of it.  No subplots, no interweaving story arcs, no surrealistic undertones to keep things just weird enough to be interesting…just a bare bones, not-really-love story….  Having never seen any of Sang-Soo Hong’s films before, it’s difficult to gauge whether the sparse narrative is usually there to make room for other underlying issues, but in this case it’s really not.  It’s just a film about a girl who is going out with a guy, then isn’t, then is again, then might be.

Occasionally, as if noticing the tumbleweeds, other issues are raised briefly, foremost amongst these being Professor Seongjun’s wife and young child.  However, Haewon never seems especially concerned about her role as home-wrecker and, as such, it’s hard to see it as a real issue in the story.  The ever-present threat of their relationship going public with the student body, too, is dealt with fairly early on in a painfully awkward scene leaving Haewon isolated from her peers and Seongjun embarrassingly marginalised in the eyes of his students, in essence, removing it as a threat.

It could be argued that there is a little more going on, as Haewon’s dips into increasingly ridiculous dreams where she is the focal point of male attention, thus countering her new-found loneliness and there is the hint (however poorly presented) that her grasp on reality is not what it might be, but neither of these points come to anything and only serve to give the film a weaker ending than was necessary to redeem it.

Nobody’s Daughter Haewon comes off like a bad Haruki Murakami novel (not that there are any, obviously!).  It maintains the grounded, everyday, central focus but fails to present anything interesting enough to warrant that focus.  The characters are unlikeable, their actions mundane, self-destructive even, and the story telling doesn’t go far enough to develop them so that we might understand why they are as they are.  Haewon buoys between irritatingly fragile and bewilderingly unperturbed, while Professor Seongjun is more of a talking plot device than an actual person; a cliché wrapped up in a trope, the ageing teacher caught between his family and the young, attractive other option where responsibility and the weight of life seem further away….think I’ve seen this one before.

Similar to the story, things are skeletal on the technical side too.  It is not really a mystery to me that Hong is a lovie of the award circuit, where stripped down production values can be passed off as edgy or artistic.  In actuality, I found much of the camera work rudimentary with poor transitions and some painful zoom work.

Nugu-ui ttal-do anin Haewon is an inoffensive film which sets out to tell a very basic story and does so.  Everything about it feels no-frills, from the direction, camera work, and even story content; its small scale and, seemingly, not trying to be anything more…so…there’s that, I guess.

2/5