Peppermint Candy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Lee Chang-dong's *Peppermint Candy* is built on a structural paradox: the story moves backward while grief only moves forward. By inverting chronology across seven episodes — peeling from Yeong-ho's suicidal collapse in 1999 back to an innocent riverside gathering in 1979 — Lee makes time-image cinema in its purest tragic mode. Deleuze's time-image belongs to films that refuse the sensory-motor link between perception and action, replacing it with a character who can only see and never redeem; Yeong-ho's scream from the railroad bridge — "I want to go back!" — is the definitional cry of the seer, a man for whom time has become pure affliction rather than a medium of agency. What prevents the reverse structure from becoming mere puzzle-craft is Kim Hyung-koo's cinematography, which anchors each episode in the long take: the camera holds, watches, and refuses to cut away from discomfort — whether from the appalling banality of Yeong-ho's work as a police torturer or the squalor of his bankruptcy. The unbroken shot does not dramatize; it bears witness, pressing time into duration that audiences must inhabit rather than observe from safety. Every episode is simultaneously what it is — a young man, a first love, a soldier's checkpoint — and what we know it must become, the wreckage on the bridge, fusing actual and virtual until the two are indiscernible: a sustained crystal-image in which innocence and ruin occupy the same frame. This layered temporal opacity owes a direct craft debt to Hou Hsiao-hsien's *A City of Sadness* (1989), whose long-take, observational staging of the 2-28 massacre gave Lee and Kim a template for holding national trauma in stillness rather than spectacle.