The film-about-filmmaking is a rite of passage for just about any filmmaker who sticks around long enough– an opportunity for autobiography-without-autobiography, a chance to reveal some level of truth in their chosen profession, even if couched in fiction. Depending on who’s doing the telling (and how many lumps they’ve taken over the course of their career), the movie-movie can be celebratory or scabrous, and can range from the self-indulgent to the self-lacerating. Cobweb, the new film from longtime Korean enfant terrible Kim Jee-woon (of I Saw the Devil and The Good, the Bad, and the Weird), manages to be all of the above, a dizzying-if-overstuffed farce about the agony and the ecstasy of filmmaking. Cobweb is good enough that I wish it was just a couple of degrees better, but its wild energy is so infectious that I can’t help but love it.

The great Song Kang-ho plays Director Kim, a frustrated filmmaker in 1970s Seoul whose initial success has given way to a fallow stretch of “racy dramas”; indeed, the quality of his later work is apparently so dismal that critics suspect that his acclaimed debut was ghostwritten by his legendary, late mentor (amusingly, all the critics in Seoul apparently frequent the same noodle bar as Kim and delight in reminding him this to his face). One night, Kim awakens from a dream with an idea for a radical new ending, which, he’s convinced, will transform his current film Cobweb from a by-the-numbers potboiler to a certified masterpiece. Kim’s pleas to the studio heads for an additional two days of shooting fall on deaf ears (especially when it becomes apparent that Kim will need to reshoot most of the rest of the film to make the ending make sense), but he soon recruits a radical disciple in the producer’s niece, Mido (a scene-stealing Jeon Yeo-bin) who greenlights the additional shoot– and bolts the doors to make sure no one leaves until Kim’s opus is finished.

Much of Cobweb– the film itself, as opposed to the film of the same name which exists within the film– plays out as a classic backstage farce. The leading lady wants to end the shoot as quickly as possible, both because she needs to return to her regular gig on a weekly hit K-drama and because she is pregnant by the philandering leading man; Mido staves off government censors first by getting them drunk, then by tying them up and stowing them in unused portions of the set; a method-acting bit player, who only appears in one scene as a detective, spends the entire shoot skulking around in a trench coat and jotting down “clues” in a notebook. There’s so much to keep track of that I couldn’t begin to map out all the relationships and subplots within a single review, and the film does sag a bit under the weight of it all, and it’s hard not to feel a bit overwhelmed by the finale (which, by my count, spans four individual climaxes). Cobweb maintains the pace of a classic screwball comedy, but when that tempo is maintained over nearly two and a half hours it can amount to too much of a good thing.

Make no mistake, though: it is a good thing. This sort of go-for-broke comic filmmaking is a rare thing these days, particularly from a voice as singular as Kim’s, and all elements of the production are working on his wavelength. The sets– both those of the fictional movie and the soundstage itself– are marvels of production design, and cinematographer Kim Ji-yong’s camera roves and weaves like Barry Sonnenfeld’s in the early Coen films. The glimpses we see of the film within the film are a hoot, apparently some sort of high-camp gothic horror/melodrama hybrid (I’m not terribly familiar with Korean exploitation film of the ‘70s, but if this parody has any basis in reality I may have to do some digging). And the cast is uniformly excellent, particularly Jeon as Director Kim’s fanatical producer/enforcer and Lim Soo-jung as the prima donna lead actress. All are appropriately playing to the rafters, and all seem to be having a great time.

But the heart of the film, as one might expect, is Song Kang-ho, who brings his characteristic blend of comedy and gravitas to the beleaguered Director Kim. As is so often the case with real-life ‘70s schlock auteurs, it’s never quite clear whether Kim is a visionary, a crackpot, or simply a hack; this ambiguity is central to the film, and expertly suited to Song’s skillset. There is an undeniable level of parody in Song’s performance (in his shaggy hairpiece and rectangular glasses he bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain other Korean filmmaker with whom we know he is familiar), and the scene in which Kim has to step into the role of an indisposed heavy carries with it the comic delight of watching one of the world’s great actors trying their hand at deliberate overacting. But there is also a reality to the director’s melancholy, conveyed through Song’s heavy sighs and thousand-yard stare. Director Kim knows that this is, if not his last film, then at least his last and best chance to prove to his critics, and to himself, that he’s more than just a one-trick pony.

But which Director Kim? There are two, after all: one in front of the camera, and one behind it. In his director’s notes, Kim Jee-woon writes that he conceived of Cobweb during a fit of despair about the state of the industry during the COVID lockdowns, and that sense of weariness informs the proceedings on a fundamental level. Cobweb is a deeply silly film– perhaps only slightly less so than the film within it– filled with wild performances, broad slapstick, and a giddy slo-mo climax set to a classic France Gall track. But one also senses a truth in its characters’ frustrations, and that the spectrum of emotions encompassed in the film’s Graduate-inspired final moments reflect the range of its director’s feelings. Cobweb is a film with a few ideas too many for its own good, but perhaps that’s just about right. Movies about movies tend to either celebrate the joys of artistic expression or bemoan the slog of the studio system. Cobweb does both.

Cobweb
2023
dir. Kim Jee-woon
135 min.

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