Burning Review

Lee Chang-dong takes a Murakami short story of a few pages and stretches it into a 148 minute study of class resentment that never once explains itself. Yoo Ah-in plays Jongsu as a young man permanently one step behind the conversation, an aspiring writer with a farm, a jailed father and no vocabulary for what he wants. Steven Yeun's Ben is the great creation here: rich, courteous, unplaceable, yawning in a way that reads as either boredom or confession.

Hong Kyung-pyo shoots the Paju countryside near the northern border in long dusks, and Jongsu's kitchen catches a rectangle of reflected sunlight for a few minutes a day, which is as good an image of borrowed comfort as recent cinema has offered us. The greenhouse monologue and Haemi's dance at sunset are the two scenes the whole film is built around, and both are staged with total patience. We concede that the last twenty minutes resolve rather more than the preceding two hours want resolved. Everything before that is the most disciplined withholding anyone managed in the decade.