COBWEB (Melbourne IFF 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Cobweb is Fellini’s 8½ run amuck and reimagined through the eyes of Kim Jee-woon in this retro film world set comedy that reflects on art, the artist and the volatile terrain of the South Korean film industry. Returning again with Parasite star and Kim’s frequent collaborator Song Kang-ho who he first worked with in his debut feature The Quiet Family (1998), the film follows a director having a crisis of self-confidence. Despite having wrapped up shooting his new melodrama Cobweb, he decides that he needs two more days to shoot a completely new ending that he has re-written from scratch in the hopes that it will be his magnum opus.
Luring his resistant cast back to the lot and facing substantial obstacles from everyone from government censors to the film’s production company, so excessive are the complex interpersonal dynamics on set that they soon rival those Kim seeks to bring to life in his movie.
That Song’s character’s name is also Kim adds a cheeky nod towards autobiography that the already heavily self-referential film is playing with. Set in the 1970s, the period context does much more than provide an excuse for some wild costuming choices; with the censorship storyline in particular and Kim’s troubled encounters with government ideologues, this is a vibrant portrait of the practical challenges that many of Kim’s predecessors faced making cinema in South Korea.
But this is no docu-fiction. At the heart of Cobweb is the complex, fumbling figure of Song’s Kim himself, an insecure artist who dreams of proving his many critics wrong. With his only support coming from Mido (Jeon Yeo-been), the production company’s accountant, Kim perseveres as his cast and crew’s eccentricities start to outshine even his own. Cobweb is very, very funny – a fast-paced comic romp through the movie-making process, with Song’s signature pathos sitting in dazzling contrast with the film’s cheekier, over-the-top melodramatic excesses.
NOTE: Without actors and writers, we wouldn’t have movies. This review was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes in the United States, and the author of this review supports them unequivocally.
