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I Liked More Than Loved

I can't help being drawn to anything involving North Korea. A country shrouded in such mystery is naturally fascinating to me. We are rarely given glimpses inside North Korea to see day-to-day life. All we know for sure is that their leader Kim Jong-un is likely either unhinged, evil, or both, much like his father and grandfather.

"The Lovers and the Despot" co-directed and co-written by Ross Adam and Robert Cannan is a documentary that examines an extremely odd event that occurred in North Korea in 1978. Kim Jong-il, the father and previous leader of North Korea, ordered the kidnapping of South Korean's premier film director Shin Sang-ok and his leading-lady actress wife, Choi Eun-hee. They were abducted and brought to North Korea for an incredibly insane reason. He wanted them to pilot a surge in North Korean cinema.

Kim Jong-il was fanatical in his love of movies. Reportedly, he owned 20,000 films. In 1987, he wrote an essay in which he said "The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature. As such it is a powerful ideological weapon for the revolution and construction." 

A good deal of the production involves Chou Eun-hee retelling the ordeal that she went through with Shin Sang-ok. Some of it works quite well, but at other times it drags a bit. The directors attempt to recreate their escape by showing her running down the street in order to get to the United States embassy, while they were outside of the country. Rather than conveying a sense of desperation, it conveys two people pretending to run away. They should have left this re-enactment out.

The escape scene is part of the bigger problem I had with the film. As amazing as the real story is, somehow it's not all that thrilling or suspenseful. It's always a shame when a documentary doesn't capture the tension of the real thing. This not to say that "The Lovers and the Despot" is somehow a waste of your time. It's not. I just believe that the people involved could have gotten more out of this very rich material. This might be the rare occasion that a fictionalized version of the events could outshine the documentary.