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November 9, 2006
AFI FEST 2006: TIME
This wasn't on my agenda at first, but none other than AICN's Drew McWeeny, possibly the only other person at the fest who likes front row seating, reminded me it was directed by Kim Ki Duk, who at the very least is always interesting. I find THE ISLE a bit of a mess, albeit one with very memorable moments; but SPRING SUMMER AUTUMN WINTER AND SPRING was genius. The overall sense of him I had from those two movies is that the man likes a slow pace.
Except here he doesn't. There's nothing extraneous at all in this, a movie that has elements of VERTIGO, FACE/OFF, and Lucky McKee's SICK GIRL (helluva combo there, eh?). You can't really do the mysterious blonde/brunette lookalike thing that Hitchcock and Lynch are so fond of when dealing with Koreans, since almost none of them are naturally blonde. But throw in plastic surgery instead, and the idea is similar.
Our main character is a photographer named Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo), whose girlfriend Seh-hee (Park Ji-yeon) is a total paranoid nutcase likely to start fights with any woman who even looks at her man...but as many guys have discovered, psycho in life = great in the sack. So Ji-woo's still hopelessly in love with her, but she has determined that all men inevitably get bored of the same woman, so she disappears, and gets plastic surgery to look totally different.
Ji-woo is distraught, but soon begins a flirtation with a waitress named See-hee (Seong Hyeon-a), who, as it turns out, may in fact be Seh-hee with her new face. Before the story is done, more surgery will be involved.
As with SICK GIRL, the metaphor at work here is how people change when you get in a serious relationship with them, and not always for the better. And yet, if you try to recapture exactly what was there before, you just might screw things up way worse than you can imagine. This isn't horror, and no-one goes on a killing spree or turns into a bug, but in terms of the twisted things people in relationships can unintentionally do to one another with their own insecurities, there's certainly some emotional horror.
I'm not sure the plastic surgery element is entirely handled realistically, but just remember it's an allegory.
Good stuff, with some haunting images. If the sculpture garden is a real place, Kim's got a great eye for location; if he designed it himself, bravissimo. I find it hard to believe that a sculpture of a dog biting a guy's dick off is on public display somewhere in Korea, but maybe...
Posted by LYT at November 9, 2006 6:12 PM [Message Board]
Comments
Wow, this is really appropriate, too, as the nation has just changed, and not for the butter. We're yet to see the results of thie change in our relationship with the government, and likely it will be for the worse instead of recaptuirng something lost that was actually 9-11 and not anything the Bush administration did.
Posted by: David N. Scott at November 9, 2006 6:52 PM
the nation has just changed, and not for the butter
...although they are banning trans-fats now in New York.
Posted by: LYT at November 9, 2006 6:59 PM
Exactly...
Posted by: David N. Scott at November 9, 2006 7:05 PM