Peppermint Candy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The film's signature image isn't a face. It's a stretch of railway track shot from the back of a moving train and then run backward, so the rails and rice fields pour away from you toward a past you can watch approaching but never reach. Lee Chang-dong slots this shot between each of his seven episodes, and it does what no line of dialogue could: it makes time visible as a substance, and shows it flowing the wrong way.

Start where the film starts — which is at the end. Yeong-ho, middle-aged and wrecked, crashes a riverside reunion, climbs onto a railroad bridge, and screams "I want to go back!" as a train bears down. He does nothing to save himself. He can't. This is what Deleuze calls a pure optical and sound situation (an opsign): a moment where a character, and we with him, can only look and listen because no action is available to change anything. The whole grammar of ordinary cinema — a man perceives a threat, a man acts to meet it — has collapsed. Yeong-ho has become what Deleuze names the seer (le voyant), not an agent but a watcher and endurer. The train is coming. He turns to face it and shouts at the past.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image, perception flows into action and action resolves the situation; the world is something you can act on. In the time-image, that circuit breaks — the character can no longer react adequately to what he sees, and so time stops being the measure of movement and starts being felt for itself. Peppermint Candy opens in the rubble of that break. And then it does something stranger than simply lingering there. It rewinds.

Each of the seven episodes is dated and titled, and each is, in Deleuze's vocabulary, a recollection-image (mnemosign) — a flashback to a former present: 1994, the bankrupt businessman; 1987, the police torturer; 1980, the conscript at Gwangju; 1979, the boy by the river with the girl from the candy factory. On their own, recollection-images are tame; cinema has always used them, and they usually return us to a present so the hero can finally act on what he remembered. Lee strips that consolation away. There is no present to return to — we already saw it die on the bridge. So the dated memories stop behaving like flashbacks and start behaving like something Deleuze called sheets of past: the past not as a single snapshot but as coexisting layers you descend through, the way Bergson imagined memory as a cone of strata all present at once. The film doesn't remember its way forward. It excavates downward.

And here the backward train earns its name as a chronosign — a direct image of time, time shown in itself rather than clocked by someone's movement across a room. Reversed, low-tech, the camera and the printer doing the narrative's work, that shot is the thesis made pure image: time runs the wrong way, return is made literal and exposed as no salvation. Lee grants Yeong-ho the wish he screamed — we do go back — and the granting is the cruelty.

What we're shown going backward is, in content, a textbook line of slope: the irreversible downward drift toward ruin and death that Deleuze associated with the impulse-image and naturalism. Conscription, a bullet fired in panic at Gwangju, the interrogation room, the failed business, the gun in the mouth. But because Lee films the slope in reverse, every step back lands as elegy. We meet cruelty first and watch it dissolve into a frightened boy. By the final, earliest episode, ordinary youthful hope — a picnic, a peppermint candy, Sun-im's face — becomes almost unbearable, because we carry the knowledge of everything it will cost. This is the engine Lee borrows directly from Pinter's Betrayal, which ran a love affair strictly backward so that every scene runs on the audience's foreknowledge. It is dramatic irony as tragedy, not as puzzle. Nothing here rewards re-viewing the way a mind-game film does; the structure isn't a lock to pick. It's a wound held open.

The observational patience — the held takes, the flat unsensational staging of military and custodial violence — descends from Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness and the Bazinian faith that duration tells the truth a cut would soften. Lee inherits the engaged social realism of the Korean New Wave (Chilsu and Mansu, A Petal, his own Green Fish) and turns it inward, so that one man's biography reads as the curriculum vitae of a traumatized nation. Gwangju, 1980, sits at the bottom of the descent as the originating violence — the moment a gentle conscript fires the shot that unmakes him. The political here works exactly as Deleuze said it must in modern cinema: through a people who are missing, a society legible only in the ruin of a single life.

Watch it again knowing the candy comes from a factory, the river is always the same river, and the train only ever runs one way. Lee just turned the film around so we could grieve in the right direction.