The dramatic tension generated in Park Hong-jun’s debut feature, Work to Do, comes from an unusual place. The time is 2016 and the protagonist is Kang Joon-hee (Jang Sung-bum), a young employee of a Korean shipbuilding company who has been transferred to human resources in a seasonal personnel reshuffle. The transfer is both good news and bad news for Kang, considering that the company is undergoing major restructuring in the face of dwindling orders and heated competition from China. Management wants to lay off about 150 people, and now that he’s in HR, Kang would seem to be safe from being downsized himself, but also because he’s in HR he’s one of the people who will be carrying out the actual cuts. (Interestingly, right now South Korea’s shipbuilding business is booming and suffering from a labor shortage.)

The kernel of Park’s story, which is supposed to be autobiographical, is that Kang, thanks to his own native intelligence and facility with spreadsheets, figures out a way to make the cuts as painless and fair as possible. He rightly feels proud of his accomplishment and is commended by his superiors in HR, but the success proves to be double-edged. Once the union and certain division heads learn of the spreadsheet and Kang’s hand in it, they put pressure on the department directly to favor certain people over others, asking HR to manipulate the careful criteria Kang has devised to “evaluate” individuals. The breaking point comes when two workers close to Kang face possible dismissals that he senses have been predetermined, and the guilt that has been hanging over his head comes crashing down. His drinking becomes a problem and his relationship with his fiancee suffers for it. Since this is Korea, the employees most at risk talk strike, thus injecting latent anger into an already painful process.

Park navigates the various inter-departmental relationships with a detailed understanding of the political processes that rule an industrial organization like this; and if some of the corporate jargon and niceties of the shipbuilding trade seem a bit arcane, he doesn’t insult his viewers by making them feel as if they can’t appreciate what these people are going through, and that goes for the nominally bad characters as well as the nominally good ones. In a later scene, Kang seeks advice from his mother, an author and former social activist, as if her counsel were a last resort, thus showing us just how much inchoate shame he bears in merely trying to do his job. In the end, it’s the scruples that matter. One can only do good by one’s fellow worker, regardless of the relative positions, if one is honest with oneself. Bosses can be ruthless when their positions are at risk, but those with a stable moral center will usually follow their conscience. Kang’s doesn’t, no matter how subtly Kang tries to steer him toward the light. I can’t think of an ethical conundrum that hits as hard as that. 

The Philippine two-hander About Us But Not About Us is also about work, or, more to the point, how one’s actions outside the workplace affect those within it. The entire movie takes place in a tastefully appointed Manila restaurant during the lunch hour and involves a conversation between a literature professor, Eric (Romnick Sarmenta), and a student named Lance (Elijah Canlas) who studied under Eric’s late lover, Marcus, one of the Philippines’ most acclaimed novelists. Marcus recently died of an overdose that we are led to believe was suicide. Ostensibly, the purpose of this luncheon rendezvous if for Lance to return a set of keys he has to Eric’s spare apartment. 

With this opening information, director Jun Robles Lana nudges the viewer into an acute state of suspicion. We’ve already seen Eric pull up to the restaurant in his vintage VW Beetle and apply some lightener to the bags under his 40-year-old eyes, thus implying a possible date in the works, and it isn’t long into their conversation that Lance comments it would not be good if any of Eric’s university colleagues or students learned that he was staying in Eric’s apartment, especially after Marcus’s death. As it turns out, Eric offered his place to Lance when he heard that the younger man was suffering abuse at the hands of his stepfather, but it also seems that he did this good deed without Marcus’s knowledge. Eric professes not to care about “false rumors” because nothing happened between them, but Lance sets him straight on how serious it would be if certain people believed a teacher was grooming one of his charges.

Since Eric is open about his homosexuality, he believes he is somewhat impervious to the kind of accusations Lance refers to, but the pandemic is still fresh in people’s minds and “inappropriateness” in the meantime has become a term that’s more loaded than it ever was. As the conversation develops in a disarmingly theatrical manner—Lana has both men “play” Marcus in imagined supplementary dialogue—it’s revealed that Eric isn’t as self-assured as he lets on and Lance isn’t as uninvolved in Marcus’s personal crisis as Eric initially thought. In fact, Lance has not only read Marcus’s first fictional foray into the Filipino language—all his previous work was in Engish—but he still has a copy of it, a revelation that shakes Eric to his core, since he was under the impression that Marcus had destroyed the manuscript. Who, we wonder, is controlling whom? There’s more, and it’s all perfectly scandalous without being entirely credible. All About Us seems like something that was written for the stage but then somehow greenlit for a movie against the writer’s better judgment. It’s fun in that, like Eric with regard to his occupational image, it’s not quite as monumental as Lana thinks it is.

Work to Do, in Korean, now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

About Us But Not About Us, in English and Filipino, now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114)

Work to Do home page in Japanese

About Us But Not About Us home page in Japanese

Work to Do photo (c) Nareun Cinema/Myung Films Lab

About Us But Not About Us photo (c) The IDEAfirst Company, Octobertrain Films, Quantum Films