The Attorney · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The bowl of soup comes first.

Before Song Woo-seok is anyone's hero, he is a broke young man who eats a bowl of gukbap he can't pay for and slips out the back of the restaurant. Years later, prosperous, he comes back and quietly leaves the money — and a relationship gets made out of a debt. Hold onto that bowl, because the whole film runs on it. When the same woman's son is arrested and tortured under the National Security Law, the debt comes due, and a comfortable tax lawyer who has cheerfully told everyone he has no interest in politics finds he has no choice.

Gilles Deleuze had a name for the kind of cinema this is. He called it the movement-image, and its engine is the action-image: a circuit where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the act actually settles the situation. Most movies you have ever loved run on this circuit. Someone sees what's wrong, someone does something, the world is different at the end. It sounds too obvious to be a concept until you notice how much modern prestige cinema has walked away from it — all those films where the hero can only watch, where nothing he does lands. The Attorney is built on the opposite faith. It believes a man can act, and that his act can change things. In 2013 that was not a naive belief. It was a political one.

Deleuze would call the version here the large-form action-image, and its shape is S–A–S′: a vast Situation bears down, a decisive Act answers it, a new Situation is born. The encompassing situation — his word is the synsign, the milieu that surrounds and presses — is the whole authoritarian apparatus of Chun Doo-hwan's Fifth Republic: the security police, the bench, the casual machinery that can turn a student reading group into a communist conspiracy. The film spends its long, genial first hour establishing how badly Song wants nothing to do with that situation. He's proud, a little buffoonish, thin-skinned about his lack of pedigree, delighted by his own real-estate money. The dossier calls the structure 'deferred ignition,' and that's exactly right. The film makes you love an ordinary man's comfort precisely so his turn costs something.

When the act finally comes, it takes a form Deleuze marks closely. The action-image at full power tends to resolve into a binomial — force against force, one body set against another. The courtroom, the dossier says, is staged as 'an arena of unequal combat': a lone advocate facing the assembled weight of prosecution, judge, and security apparatus. That is the duel at the heart of the large form. But watch what the film does with the duel. It never lets Song throw a punch. It converts the fight into speech.

This is the move that makes The Attorney smarter than its premise. Deleuze has a category for an image that stops acting and starts arguing — the reflection-image, where action is transposed into figure and discourse rather than discharged directly. The torture happens off-screen, muffled, a body worked on in the dark. The courtroom is its exact inverse: public, ringing, articulate, a place where the blow becomes a question about what a citizen is. Song's rising oratory — the film's true sonic centerpiece — is force that has been turned into discourse and aimed at the law itself. This is the discourse-image: an image that poses a problem, citizenship and the rule of law, that the situation cannot yet resolve. The state tortures in silence; the lawyer answers in the open, and the answer is a speech about the constitution. The whole film is the conversion of the one into the other.

And the man is changed by the situation as much as he changes it. Deleuze calls this the imprint — the bond by which a situation and a character stamp themselves on each other. You can read it in Song Kang-ho's body, the prosperous striver's wardrobe giving way to the embattled posture of someone who has put everything at risk. He does not walk in a saint. He is imprinted into one.

Place the film in its line and the argument sharpens. Its ancestors are the great courtroom orations — Atticus Finch's closing argument in To Kill a Mockingbird, the patient dismantling of a fabricated case in 12 Angry Men, the conscience tried by the state in A Man for All Seasons, the historical crescendo of JFK. All of them share the large-form faith: that a sustained act of speech, inside a juridical frame, can reverse a verdict and move a nation. Closer to home, the film inherits the Song Kang-ho persona from Memories of Murder, the comic everyman colliding with the brutal indifference of the 1980s state, and the torture-vocabulary of Peppermint Candy. What Yang Woo-seok, a webtoon artist making his first feature, added was scale and timing. He welded the Hollywood oration template to Korean historical trauma and released it at the moment Roh Moo-hyun's death had made that trauma unbearable. Eleven million people came.

Here is why it matters as cinema. European modern film decided the action-image was spent — that after the camps and the cliché, the honest response was the seer who can only look. The Attorney refuses that conclusion, and refuses it on purpose. It insists that perception can still pass into action, that the sensory-motor circuit can still close, and it makes that insistence its politics. The bowl of soup gets paid for by a speech in a courtroom. Whether you find that faith earned or sentimental is the real question the film leaves open. But watch it again and watch what it does to a room full of people, and you'll feel the old machine turn over and catch.