[HanCinema's Film Review] "Troublers"

Director Lee Young quickly outlines the gay experience in South Korea by framing "Troublers" around interviews with Lee Mook, an elderly man who happens to have a vagina. Some people are suspicious. Most don't care, although Lee Mook is understandably hesitant about being too open about himself. Hesitance notwithstanding, Lee Mook finds dates easily and has several marriages under his belt. None of them successful, although he attributes that to his personality more than the whole LGBT thing.

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Lee Mook's story is fascinating because it immediately presents gay issues in a quite conservative light. Lee Mook just wants to be left alone, and even during South Korea's dictatorial years, his clubs were denied permits more for generic political reasons. No one seriously thought that lesbian taxi drivers were going to drive around the country spreading MERS everywhere in tandem with Communist propaganda directed by Kim Il-sung, the biggest gayest bear of them all.

...Ah yes, that brings me to the other main plank of "Troublers", is just director Lee Young going with her camera crew to conservative rallies and documenting the utterly bizarre arguments they come up with to oppose gay rights. Activist South Korean conservatives are also diehard anti-Communists, and apparently at some point managed to convince themselves that North Korea and the gay agenda are in some sort of bizarre alliance, frequently referring to them interchangably.

What's even weirder is that even though these are public rallies director Lee Young is constantly hassled for filming anything. An especially bizarre sequence involves the hullaballoo surrounding the Seoul Human Rights Charter. It mostly consists of students sitting uncomfortably in an auditorium while conservatives a few meters away loudly accuse everyone involved of being some sort of queer fifth columnist.

As the opening film of this year's Women's Film Festival in Incheon (WFFI), "Troublers" got constant laughter from the standing room only audience, as it did from me. Yet the experience as a whole was rather bittersweet, because none of this should be funny. These conservatives are a legitimate powerful political force in South Korea even though they'd rightly be dismissed as lunatics if more people had any exposure to their actual arguments.

The irony gets especially deep when these same conservative activists start to protest Sewol- specifically, the desire by families of the victims for a proper investigation. Sewol killed more South Koreans in a single day than North Korea has in the past forty years, and gay people ever. Yet once the conservatives get into weird conspiracy mode, there just isn't any stopping them. Even an appeal to basic human decency isn't enough.

Thank goodness we get back to Lee Mook every once in awhile, as well as a brief interview with a Japanese lesbian couple. Director Lee Young makes a very compelling pro gay rights argument simply by showing us normal gay people minding their own business only to be harassed by conservatives apropos of nothing. Though an exceptional comedy, ultimately, it's director Lee Young's documentation of little-known South Korean life, political or not, that really makes "Troublers" a fantastic documentary.

Review by William Schwartz

"Troublers" is directed by Lee Young