im Ji-Won is probably one of the top five directors in Korea right now, with only four movies to his credit. He has never made the same type of film twice. His first, the deadpan black comedy THE QUIET FAMILY, has the dubious honour of being remade into a hysterical DIY musical by Takeshi Miike, THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS.
His second, THE FOUL KING, was a comedy about an office worker who becomes a masked wrestler and loses himself in the fantasy life.
His short film HOME, in the pan-Asian horror anthology THREE, is a hallucinatory nightmare about limbo in a housing estate. That whetted his appetite for A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, a gothic ghost story that takes the key Korean folktale about the evil stepmother and the revenge of the dead girl she persecuted and reimagines it into a labyrinthine maze of psychological trauma, and is probably the most stylish ghost story in the current cycle of Asian horror films.
A BITTERSWEET LIFE is Kim's entry in the gangster genre. It has more in common with Cocteau, French existential movies and Michael Mann. The hero is a gangland enforcer who has never been in love, who doesn't have a life outside of his work. He's a coiled spring of precise, efficient violence and highly valued by his boss. He's given an assignement: to watch his boss' young mistress, and if she's unfaithful, to kill her.
He chooses not to kill her, and unleashes an avalanche of Hell and Retribution upon himself. But when a hard man's heart melts for the first time in his life, and he's made to pay for it, he's apt to return some Hell and Retribution of his own.
It's not the originality of the plot, but the oblique and unexpected approach Kim Ji-Won takes to tell his story here. He goes all out with the hyperreal, ultrastylish Cinemascope compositions of cool, sleek surfaces that mirror his hero's melting glacial exterior. The setpieces are amazing, but it's the moments of silence that punctuate them that make the movie surprisingly contemplative, the camera dwelling on the star's face, after the torture sequences, the fights, and the apocalyptic shoot-out. The film becomes increasingly off-beat as it goes along, my favourite moments being a bunch of bumbling Russian-Siberian arms dealers. And Kim withholds the emotional pay-off and the revelations for the final moments of the movie, making it a gangster movie that plays to the rhythm of a heart breaking in slow motion.
This is one of the of the best films of the year.
ARAHAN is the Korean martial arts-superhero comedy hit of 2004.
A nerdish traffic cop is accidentally zapped by a shopgirl with Chi powers when she was trying to stop a purse-snatcher. He discovers that her father and the friends who trained her are Secret Masters of martial arts who who has stayed hidden in ordinary life for decades, waiting for the right pupil to pass their teachings to. And they in turn discover that with his extraordinary Chi potential, that student is him. When an old enemy escapes from his prison, intent on taking over the world, they suddenly have a deadline to turn him into a Master to save the day.
Again, the premise isn't original, but it's the execution and incidental details that carry the show. The wittiest touch is the story's location of superpowered sages hiding among the bickering urban working class of modern-day Seoul, working as shopkeepers, labourers and small businessmen. The cute superpowered girl works as a convenience store who uses her breaks to run across rooftops and down the sides of buildings to fight crime. The supervillain is unleashed from a secret tomb by workmen drilling to extend some roadworks. The martial arts wire-fu is as slick and accomplished as anything from Hong Kong, but takes the movie one-ups CROUCHING TIGER by being totally irreverent and taking the piss at every opportunity. As a superhero movie, it shares a lot in common with Raimi's Spider-man films, but is a lot more exuberant and much funnier.
Director Ryu Seung-Wan is one of the other top five directors in Korea. He's got all the savvy and inventive wit of Sam Raimi, and casts his brother, the talented Ryu Seung-Bum as his lead.
CRYING FIST
So yes, Ryu Seung-Wan is practically the Korean Sam Raimi, and here he takes a completely different tack after ARAHAN.
The story is simple: an aging boxer and a juvenile delinquent separately use the sport to claw their way back to a life worth living, and eventually face each other in a lightweight championship bout where both has everything to lose and everything to gain.
Boxing movies are underdog redemption stories, not to mention weepies for men. Guys feel better about being emotional after having the snot pounded after them, because they feel less girly about it, and CRYING FIST lays it on in spades. It subverts the conventions by making both its main characters sympathetic underdogs fighting to regain their dignity.
Choi Min-Sik from OLD BOY is the older guy, a former Silver Medalist boxer whose life has gone to shit after years of bad investments and fair-weather friends who took his money and never came back. His wife has thrown him out and his son is embarrassed by him. He has brain damage from all those blows to the head and he makes money by offering himself as a punching bag to passers-by to take out their frustrations on.
Ryu Seung-Bum, the director's brother again, plays a completely different role from the well-meaning nerd in ARAHAN. Here he's a sullen tearaway with a mountain of pent-up rage and a way with his fists. He starts to find an outlet in the boxing program in jail, and after his father dies, feels the need to atone for the grief he caused his ailing grandmother.
By the time the two men meet in the ring at the film's climax, we're rooting for both of them and watching the tragedy of two men trying to find redemption by pummelling the shit out of each other.
Unlike the cartoon stylisation of ARAHAN, director Ryu goes for a sharp, high-contrast look and the use of long lenses to draw you into the characters' world. And unlike namby-pamby Hollywood fights, he shoots the fights in long uninterrupted mastershots without the use of stunt doubles. It's the dynamism of both style and story that reinvents the boxing movie.
Sounds like Korea is aping HK's strongest genres: the wire fu flick and the heroic blood shed gangster movie. Hopefully these movies (and Sympathy for Lady Vegeance) will be in Chinatown next time I visit Vancouver
Classified under:Korea,movies
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