K-class, K-prestige and K-artistry found their apogee in the movies with Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning 2019 smash Parasite – and this colossally successful South Korean social satire certainly found a place for one of that country’s biggest stars.
In his 40s and in his prime, with a string of blue-chip movie credits and a home-turf household name due to his TV work, Lee Sun-kyun displayed in Parasite his discreet charisma and sleek movie-star handsomeness with a sexual presence that could be dialled up or down.
It was a supporting role, and his character – destined here to be upstaged – was the karmic opposite of the star, Song Kang-ho, who played Kim, the rackety head of a predatory family of petty criminals who infiltrate a wealthy household as an apparently unrelated bunch of live-in servants. Their employer is Mr Park, played by Lee, a well-to-do man with a picture-perfect lifestyle who is, perhaps, Jekyll to Kim’s Hyde, but Lee’s performance radiated a kind of smugness in the glamour.
Fans of Lee might well have savoured the residual aura of sexuality that he brought with him – from movies where he played a married man having (or ambiguously about to have) a forbidden relationship.
In Hong Sang-soo’s gently garrulous comedy Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013), he is Lee, a movie director and film studies professor who is obsessed with a student (the Haewon of the title) who had broken off their illicit affair but now wants to get back in touch. In Hong’s Oki’s Movie (2010), he also played a movie director with a history of illicit affairs – though in the same director’s 2008 comedy Night and Day, set in Paris, Lee had a pungent role as a belligerent North Korean student.
Park Chan-ok’s complex mystery-drama Paju (2009), set in the tense border zone with North Korea, probably challenged Lee as an actor more than either of these. He is Joong-shik, the teacher and community leader with a dark sexual past who has a strange relationship with his wife’s teenage sister.
Lee was an A-lister of the Korean film industry – his sad death is a chilling event in Korean cinema.
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