Cosmic Trace

Cosmic Trace is a film of dissolves – and it’s not only because of Jang Woo-jin’s penchant of segueing from one scene to another with cross-fades. It’s much bigger and more metaphysical than that. In his first outing in six years, the Korean cineaste has produced a quietly devastating piece that could easily melt the most hardened mind about the fragility of human existence – but without resorting, not even once, to sentimentalised depictions of sickness and death.

Tracking the tortuous tribulations engulfing a young, professionally underachieving couple and their terminally ill elders over the course of one single and very difficult year, Cosmic Trace provides ample imagery and space for the engaged viewer to reflect on what one of them describes as “a lifetime that you and I couldn’t fathom”. Fuelled by a carefully crafted screenplay peppered with surprising twists that echo the uncertainty of chance in life – those who seem predestined to die survive, while the robust suddenly succumb – the film also propels itself further into the void with episodic computer-generated sequences of its characters reduced to floating atoms in the dark wide cosmos.

Having already graced A-list festivals with each of his previous three features – A Fresh Start at Locarno, Autumn, Autumn at the Berlinale and Winter’s Night at Tallinn Black Nights – Jang’s decision to premiere his latest outing at home is perhaps a surprise. And it’s definitely a coup of sorts for Busan, where Cosmic Trace could easily have been slotted in the main competition rather than the Vision Korea section. But never mind: to misquote the characters in the film, life (and film festivals) moves in mysterious ways, and Jang’s film – with its very original vision and its echoes of, among others, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Michael Haneke’s Amour – will certainly leave plenty of traces on the festival circuit very soon.

Cosmic Trace begins (and actually ends) with its two protagonists staring at the skies and talking about the constellations and meteor showers hovering high above them. It’s a thinly-veiled allusion, perhaps, to how human beings are merely tiny speckles of transient matter in a universe with a configuration that is beyond our realm of understanding. Back on Earth, the pair surely can’t understand what they’re doing or have done wrong, with Hyeon-ji (Jang Serim) stuck with producing no-budget videos about a cheaply costumed, child-saving “Galaxyman” for a YouTube channel while Ji-hyeon (Kang Seung-ho) flounders repeatedly at auditions, weighed down by his past as a renowned child actor.

The couple keep their calm when multiple crises stack up in their respective families. Just as Hyeon-ji’s grandmother’s health worsens, she catches sight of her physician father Ki-cheol (Bong Man-dae) leaving a hotel with another woman – a misunderstanding that stands unresolved when he suddenly dies. On the other side of town, Ji-hyeon’s mother Kyeong-ja (Kim Hyun) – the modest, mild-mannered owner of a grimy but surprisingly profitable recycling dump – is diagnosed as having untreatable cancer.

Jang succeeds in teasing measured performances from his cast, as they strike a very delicate balance in evoking their characters’ predicaments and anguish without puncturing their near-fatalist attitudes towards the ebb and flow of their lives. Melodrama is out of the question, just as notions of karma are cast to the wind. There are hardly villains in Cosmic Trace, not even someone remotely bad. Rather than following his peers into the fortune-making world of plastic surgery, the upbeat Ki-cheol sticks with his markedly unglamorous (and much less profitable) job of reconstructing cleft lips in a hospital. The gaunt Kyeong-ja, meanwhile, is a paragon of virtue, as she defies the pain of her illness to carry on, only secretly channelling her thoughts into letters designed to be read posthumously by her son.

That said, Jang never shies away from the harshness of life. Kyeong-ja’s slow demise is certainly brutal to watch, with the viewer inevitably empathising with her struggle and the conflicting feelings of her helpless loved ones. Doing the splicing himself, the director manages to condense stretches of the quotidian and the extreme – all filmed with precision in light and time by DP Yang Jeong-hun – into a coherent whole.

In the conversation concluding Cosmic Trace, Ji-hyeon asks Hyeon-ji: “Have you ever thought about how you want to die?” She replies: “On my own terms.” That sums up Jang’s work well: with this moving ode to the living, the dying and the dead, the director has delivered a unique piece, a film that is at once beautiful in its look, brutal in its depiction of the world, and benevolent in its empathy for the grief-stricken.

Director, screenwriter, editing: Jang Woo-jin
Producers: Jang Ji-won
Executive producers: Jang Woo-jin, Jang Ji-won, Han Sunhee
Cast: Jang Serim, Kang Seung-ho, Kim Hyun, Bong Man-dae, Kim Soo-hyun
Cinematography: Yang Jeong-hun
Music: Hang Minhee
Sound: Lee Jusuk
Production companies: Cosmos Pictures, Widelog Co Ltd
World sales: M-Line Distribution
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Korea)
In Korean
106 minutes