Extra teeth. That was the secret of Freddie Mercury, or, at any rate, of the singular sound he made. In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a new bio-pic about him, Mercury (Rami Malek) reveals all: “I was born with four more incisors. More space in my mouth, and more range.” Basically, he’s walking around with an opera house in his head. That explains the diva-like throb of his singing, and we are left to ponder the other crowd-wooing rockers of his generation; do they, too, rely upon oral eccentricity? Is it true that Rod Stewart’s vocal cords are lined with cinders, and that Mick Jagger has a red carpet instead of a tongue? What happens inside Elton John’s mouth, Lord knows, although “Rocketman,” next year’s bio-pic about him, will presumably spill the beans.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” starts with the Live Aid concert, in 1985. That was the talent-heavy occasion on which Queen, fronted by Mercury, took complete command of Wembley Stadium and, it is generally agreed, destroyed the competition. We then flip back to 1970, and to the younger Freddie—born Farrokh Bulsara, in Zanzibar, and educated partly at a boarding school in India, but now dwelling in the London suburbs. This being a rock movie, his parents are required to be conservative and stiff, and he is required to vex them by going out at night to see bands.
If the film is to be trusted (and one instinctively feels that it isn’t), the birth of Queen was smooth and unproblematic. Mercury approaches two musicians, Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) and Brian May (Gwilym Lee), in a parking lot, having enjoyed their gig; learns that their group’s lead singer has defected; and, then and there, launches into an impromptu audition for the job. Bingo! The resulting lineup, now graced with John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) on bass, lets rip onstage, with Freddie tearing the microphone from its base to create the long-handled-lollipop look that will stay with him forever. Queen already sounds like Queen, and, before you know it, the boys have a manager, a contract, an album, and a cascade of wealth. It’s that easy. As for their first global tour, it is illustrated by the names of cities flashing up on the screen—“Tokyo,” “Rio,” and so forth, in one of those excitable montages which were starting to seem old-fashioned by 1940.
As a film, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is all over the place. So is “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a song, yet somehow, by dint of shameless alchemy and professional stamina, it coheres; the movie shows poor Roger Taylor doing take after take of the dreaded “Galileo!” shrieks, bravely risking a falsetto-related injury in the cause of art. Anyone hoping to be let in on Queen’s trade secrets will feel frustrated, although I liked the coins that rattled and bounced on the skin of Taylor’s drum, and it’s good to watch Deacon noodle a new bass riff—for “Another One Bites the Dust”—purely to stop the other band members squabbling. The later sections of the story, dealing with Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis, are carefully handled, but most of the film is stuffed with lumps of cheesy rock-speak (“We’re just not thinking big enough”; “I won’t compromise my vision”), and gives off the delicious aroma of parody. When Mercury tries out the plangent “Love of My Life” on the piano, it’s impossible not to recall the great Nigel Tufnel, in “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984), playing something similar in D minor, “the saddest of all keys,” and adding that it’s called “Lick My Love Pump.”
The funniest thing about the new film is that its creation was clearly more rocklike than anything to be found in the end product. Bryan Singer, who is credited as the director, was fired from the production last year and replaced by Dexter Fletcher, although some scenes appear to have been directed by no one at all, or perhaps by a pizza delivery guy who strayed onto the set. The lead role was originally assigned to Sacha Baron Cohen (a performance of which we can but dream), although Malek, mixing shyness with muscularity, and sporting a set of false teeth that would make Bela Lugosi climb back into his casket, spares nothing in his devotion to the Mercurial. The character’s carnal wants, by all accounts prodigious, are reduced to the pinching of a waiter’s backside, plus the laughable glance that Freddie receives from a bearded American truck driver at a gas station as he enters the bathroom. With its PG-13 rating, and its solemn statements of faith in the band as a family, “Bohemian Rhapsody” may be the least orgiastic tribute ever paid to the world of rock. Is this the real life? Nope. Is this just fantasy? Not entirely, for the climax, quite rightly, returns us to Live Aid—to a majestic restaging of Queen’s contribution, with Malek displaying his perfect peacock strut in front of the mob. If only for twenty minutes, Freddie Mercury is the champion of the world.
Wandering in a daze, along cacophonous streets, a young South Korean man named Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) meets a former schoolmate, who is distributing raffle tickets outside a store. Not that he recognizes her. She hails him, introduces herself as Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jeon), and adds, “I had plastic surgery! Pretty, right?” Already, in the opening minutes of “Burning,” a note of uncertainty has been struck. If she is so radically transformed, how can he be sure that it’s her?
“Burning,” directed by Lee Chang-dong, is based on “Barn Burning,” a story by Haruki Murakami. An English translation was first published in this magazine, in 1992, and Lee’s adaptation is at once elastically free, with many details changed, and loyal to Murakami’s blend of the perplexing and the crystalline. One thing that does survive is Hae-mi’s demonstration of her miming skills, as she peels and eats a nonexistent tangerine—the trick being, as she explains, not to pretend that something is there but to forget that it isn’t. In the same vein, although Jong-su agrees to look after her cat while she’s away on holiday, the relevant pet is nowhere in sight. “Am I coming here to feed an imaginary cat?” he says. Murakami didn’t write that line, but he probably wishes he had.
Hae-mi inhabits a mini-apartment, where the sunlight rarely ventures. Jong-su has sex with her there, soon after they meet, and masturbates there, suffused with longing, once she’s gone. (He’s a writer, or he’s trying to be a writer, so I guess he has to fill his days somehow.) The action often switches to his family farm, north of Seoul, and so close to North Korea that Jong-su can listen to its propaganda on the radio. The farmstead is untended because his father, an angry man with a secret collection of knives, has been arrested for assault. As for Jong-su’s mother, she left when he was a little boy. He hasn’t seen her for sixteen years, and, when they do get together, in the city, she spends most of the time giggling at her phone. In short, our hero is adrift, cut loose from both his family and the wider economy; we overhear a report, on TV, about the high rate of youth unemployment. No wonder he hungers for Hae-mi.
What joy, then, when she asks him to fetch her from the airport. And what a blow when she arrives with another guy in tow. Not just any guy, but a swell named Ben (Steven Yeun), who has a Porsche Carrera and a gaggle of equally flush friends. “Nowadays, for us, there’s no difference between working and playing,” he says to Jong-su, who comes to resent this coolly intrusive figure, as you’d expect, yet can’t help being pulled into his slipstream. If someone confesses, as Ben does, to a criminal penchant for setting greenhouses on fire, how can you not want to learn more? There’s an extraordinary scene in which the two men, having shared a joint with Hae-mi, sit outside and watch her strip to the waist and perform a swaying dance—less to sate their prying gaze, you sense, than to answer some ritual need of her own.
The dance is accompanied by Miles Davis’s score for “Elevator to the Gallows” (1958), and deepened still further by the light—or, rather, by the failing of the light, which turns Hae-mi into a semi-silhouette. Lee is drawn to borders of every kind; where the day surrenders to darkness, for instance, or where the town makes such grudging way for the country that you can’t tell which is which. The movie, though elegantly framed, favors the unbeautiful, and its landscapes are littered with rusty junk.
The most dramatic half-life is that of Hae-mi, who, in a distant echo of “L’Avventura” (1960), vanishes from the story as if slipping from a room. Jong-seo Jeon, making her début, is the most energizing presence onscreen, and, to that extent, her character’s exit is a shame. On the other hand, it suits the prevailing mood of mystification, and it means that Jong-su, who suspects Ben of having harmed or abducted Hae-mi, spends the rest of the film in search of her. As a sleuth, he is hapless and listless, and some viewers may feel an urge to deface the poster for “Burning” as they leave the cinema, scrawling the word “Slow” above the title; yet the smolder of foreboding is never doused. Personally, for that reason, I would have lopped off the final scene, which I simply didn’t believe in, and which, if anything, resolves too much. A movie as cryptic as “Burning” deserves to hang fire. ♦
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