Educational Media Reviews Online

The Red Chapel is the name of a thoroughly peculiar, two-man "comedy" team from Denmark. The two comedians are both young Danish guys of Korean descent: bulky, tattooed, guitar-banging hipster Simon Jul, and his spiky-haired cohort Jacob Nossell, who has cerebral palsy and occasionally uses a wheelchair. The manager and director of this odd couple, and the director of this theatrically eponymous film, is a terminally hip, perpetually glib Dane named Mads Brügger. Somewhere along the road, Brügger seems to have gotten the idea that it would be some kind of cool political statement and post-post-mod hoot to take this antic show on the road to North Korea as a form of subversive "cultural exchange." As for the act itself, one wonders (but is never told) if it was thrown together exclusively for this guerrilla foray, or if it had a former lumbering life of its own somewhere in bowels of the Danish theater underground. In any case, it's painful to watch, involving as it does bodily noises, really bad singing and guitar playing, kazoos, pratfalls, stupid skits with largely unintelligible dialog, and the uncomfortable sense that Jacob's role in the act, intentionally or not, is largely as a sideshow oddity.

So off they go to Pyongyang to fling their "art" in the face of Kim Jong-il's repressive dictatorship, or, in Mads' voice-over words, to "expose the very core of the evilness of North Korea." The three are shadowed ceaselessly by smiling Mrs. Pak, a pathologically dogged but sentimental, member of the secret police. Over the course of their stay, their act is systematically bled of most cultural referents and bawdiness by their polite but iron-fisted hosts, who also not-so-subtly manage to insert outright propaganda into the act. Jacob and his wheelchair are slowly relegated to a minor role. ("They smile at me, but at the same time I sense their contempt.") The disabled are apparently politically embarrassing to the regime, and dealt with accordingly.

The political and moral transgressions are by no means one sided, however. Brügger's film is, in many ways, enormously problematic and troubling in terms of personal and documentary ethics. Exposing the repression, political horrors, and fear in North Korean society is like shooting ducks in a barrel; it's no great filmmaking feat to cast a light on facts and conditions that have been well-documented over the past half-century. Admittedly there are some sequences that send shivers up the backbone (the mass Peace Celebration marking the anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean war looks like something straight out of Leni Riefenstahl); but it's still hard to shake the nagging question, "What exactly is the point of Brügger's stunt and this documentary?" One gets the queasy feeling that the filmmaker's elaborate hoax is ultimately little more than a perverse exercise in hipster ego and irony. Worse, there's the sense that both Jacob and Simon are only vaguely witting pawns in Brügger's cynical games. Mid-point in the stay, Jacob breaks down under the stress of role playing and having to contend with the grim realities and injustices of North Korean life. He bounces back after awhile, and eventually calls Brügger's game by asking: "...don't you have any moral scruples, Mads Brügger?" In the most touching scene in the film Jacob explains that "It's not just as simple as saying that North Korea is a terrible place." He explains that he has "learned a lot about evil...You can get very afraid." Hannah Arendt would understand what he's talking about.

It could be that Brügger is considerably more clever than I've given him credit for. This film could be an exercise in well-intentioned humanitarianism, self-reflexivity, and ironic self-effacement. I don't really think so, however. The film credits roll over a completely gratuitous scene of Jacob doing a crack-voiced karaoke version of John Lennon's "Imagine" and all original suspicions seem to be confirmed. As a political science or Asian Studies document, there's fairly little to learn from Red Chapel. The filmmaker's smugness, self-satisfaction, and theater of cruelty pretty much overshadow everything else. On the other hand, as a documentary that has a number of complex things to say about the image and treatment of disabled people, it could be both useful and interesting.