[HanCinema's Film Review] "BLACKDEAL"

This documentary does not have a very positive attitude toward privatization- hence the rather ominous title. Similarly, the use of selective interviews to establish a point is obvious. Random passengers on the British train system aren't really the best people to ask for the overall state of the system. Customers complain about everything. That's just a fact of life.

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Where the documentary better excels is when it lets the proponents of privatization make their own rather unconvincing arguments. When we're told that fares have both increased and decreased (depending on the kind of fare), the attitude comes off as equivocating. The existence and qualifications regarding discount fares are pretty irrelevant to most of the population, who lack the time and inclination to do detailed research about the cheapest way of travel.

Claims about minor improvements in the system similarly come off pretty unimpressively when we take into account the fact "serves more passengers" is a pretty easy goal to make what with population movements being what they've been in the last thirty years. Short of disasters that end up killing people, it's pretty hard to guess what would be enough to make these people think privatization was a failed experiment.

Bear in mind the documentary deals with plenty such disasters that apparently did no such thing. The Sewol ferry tragedy is not mentioned in "BLACKDEAL", but the relevance is difficult to ignore. Mystical explanations like Confucianism got plenty of press, yet "BLACKDEAL" demonstrates that even in countries on completely opposite sides of the planet similar disasters crops up. The only commonality linking all these events? Privatization.

This correlation is so obvious it makes most of the apologist arguments for why the system works seem like a pretty big stretch. Many of the pro-privatization people describes abstract situations that most consumers couldn't possibly even know about. This ignorance, by the way, really does a good job framing the common consumer criticisms as not being inspired by an agenda, but rather just noting that the system doesn't work for them.

Interestingly, when the documentary moves into South America, there is more awareness, but it's obvious that this is mostly because the positive dividends of privatization are even more dubious in Chile and Argentina. The film's best shot is of an dangerously crowded Argentinian subway inching at a minute pace onto the platform, where another huge crowd of people waits hovering on the yellow line in obvious disregard of safety protocols. Is this the fault of the system, or just dumb consumers who won't ever be satisfied by anything?

If nothing else, director Lee Jo-hoon makes a fairly compelling case that privatization won't magically solve all our problems. Yes, the apologists in the movie note that time is needed. But thirty years? Forty years? And all these major issues still exist? I guess I just have a lot of trouble believing that we live in era where it's possible to spy indiscriminately on populations numbering in the millions but making the trains run on time is somehow an intrinsically impossible feat.

 

"BLACKDEAL" is directed by Lee Jo-hoon