Miss and Mrs. Cops (Geolkapseu, South Korea, 2019) – GFF3

Sisters doing it

My preference for trying to see films without preconceptions is relatively easy to do at film festivals as most of the films have received little or no press coverage in the UK. It can come unstuck though as it did with this film: as it is a ‘South Korean cop movie’ I thought, ‘What’s not to like?’. While it is a South Korean cop movie it is also a comedy and while there’s nothing wrong with that genre mix, I found the serious issues dealt with didn’t gel with the humour. The pastiche, slapstick and farce were too powerful in tone and overwhelmed the serious social issues the film tackles: sexist South Korea. This reaction is likely due to the fact I’m not South Korean (I hope my maleness wasn’t an issue) for the film played very well in its country of origin but, interestingly, only to women; as Richard Yu describes:

‘Perhaps the strong feminist undertones turned away men at the box office; while the film smashed box office records, Korea JoongAng Daily reports that more than three-quarters of the moviegoers were women. Online reviews also showed a stark contrast between men, who rated the film 1.6 out of 10, and women, who rated the film 9.6 out of 10. It turns out men don’t like being called out on misogynistic behavior—who would’ve guessed?’

The behaviour is two-fold: sex videos used to humiliate women and patriarchal institutions blocking women’s progress in the police force. The sexual violence, in particular, is disturbing (it isn’t shown in the film) and so I found the comic episodes jarred. The opening starts like a Hong Kong action comedy, Steven Chow’s work sprang to mind, but with women doing the beating up. So far so good. It’s humour is broad brush and while there’s nothing wrong with that, I couldn’t reconcile it with the social commentary.

On the plus side the editing is sensational (I can’t find out who did it). There are a lot of action sequences, which are nothing special, but the pace of the editing brings so much to the film. However, on one watching it was too fast to work out how it was working and as I won’t be watching it again I’ll remain forever puzzled.

As it turned out Miss and Mrs. Cops was the only disappointing film of the ten I saw in Glasgow; not a bad return.