The Quiz Show Scandal (Kwijeu Wang) (6/10)

January 6th, 2011

Part of the fun in quiz shows, I reckon, is when we yell at the screen as one hopeful or another stumbles on a question they cannot answer and yet is so easy for the rest of us. That’s the thing about questions: you either know the answer or you don’t. It’s also why the Korean television quiz show presented here hasn’t had a winner in a year and a half, with the current prize a whopping 13.5 million dollars. With that much money at stake, knowing the answer to the final question might be pretty valuable.

The first chapter of the Korean comedy The Quiz Show Scandal has nothing to do with scandals, or indeed television quizzes. Instead, it is used to introduce the characters that will congregate in a police station as a result of a random accident on one of Seoul’s highways, where four cars crash into each other because the first car failed to see a girl hurling herself in front of him. The police try to recreate the event: which car actually killed her? Was it the first one when she rolled up his bonnet? The second, who flipped her into the air? Or maybe the fourth, who ran over her? It’s a quiz in its own right.

The respective occupants of the cars are: a debt-collector heavy and his associate; a father/son combo on their way home from hospital; four sad-sacks returning from a Depressives Anonymous meeting; and a married couple on the rocks due to the husband’s penchant for gambling. While they wait in the police station, the accident is recreated with Hot Wheels cars, and a surprising discovery is made. The dead girl had in her possession a pen drive that contains the vital 30th question for the next episode of the national quiz show. The assembled group, which also includes some interested police officers, now know the answer. What they don’t know is the other 29 questions. They each have the same idea: Apply for the show and get studying. Forms are filled in and trivia books are purchased.

Writer/director Jin Jang has a fun old time assembling the pieces of the story together here, with disparate folks united in their lust for the elusive prize. There’s a Tarantino-esque feel about the early scenes – the doofus debt-collectors, the prolonged police station scene, the humour in tragedy, etc – but gradually the comedy element comes to the fore in scenes that are actually pretty funny. The sight of a group of taekwondo competitors, all clad in white, trudging off as their entrant is knocked out early is one I’ll remember for a while. In this movie though, like all good quiz shows, what goes before is only a preamble to the main event, the final question, the one where all is won or lost. There are two competitors who appear to be smarter than the rest but it’s impossible to know everything. One rogue question and all the study will be for nought.

Some decent laughs (most of which would appeal to international humour lovers), typically attractive Korean camerawork and an unusual compilation of styles, The Quiz Show Scandal is somewhat of a rarity. It doesn’t always work – it fizzles away when it should go out with a bang, for example, and there are a couple of characters so completely over-the-top as to take you out of the general conviviality of it all – but I didn’t glance at my watch once during its almost two-hour runtime. For a non-English speaking comedy, that must mean The Quiz Show Scandal is pretty good.