Ki-duk Kim
An uncompromising, independent, Korean film-maker who, like Breillat, often straddles the border between transgressive shock and meaningful, provocative art. His movies can somehow be both subtle and crude at the same time, with heavy-handed symbolism laid out clearly but still uncovering subtle difficulties when it comes to grasping the underlying meaning. His movies are parables. They can be taken at face-value but that would be like taking an adaptation of the Emperor's New Clothes literally. It would make sense but only in an absurd way. In other words, his movies explore ideas untainted by commercial concerns and he takes these explorations to their extreme conclusions - a man after my own heart. Kim doesn't intellectually masturbate like many art-film-makers, but takes a poetic idea, purifies it, works out its various aspects, and converts it into an uncompromising movie, usually setting it in provocative and twisted circumstances. Sometimes this works beautifully (e.g. The Isle), other times it falls apart under confusing and half-baked messages (e.g. Samaria). Other trademarks include creative, striking and unpredictable elements, the use of action, violence or subtle behaviour (not words) to communicate, silent lead characters, numerous heartfelt, detailed little scenes and visuals, and the emergence of warmth, truth, humanity and emotion out of reprehensible morals and behaviour. This page reviews the parable in Kim's most extreme movies. The rest are left to the viewer to explore.
An artistic, shocking love story that disturbed audiences and confused almost all critics that couldn't see beyond the disturbing images. A mute girl maintains a fishing resort where people stay in floating mini-houses while fishing, resting and using prostitutes. She services them in any way she can in order to make ends meet but the crude clientele annoy her often, forcing her at times to take revenge. Along comes a brooding, suicidal client with a dark past. Will they connect through their pain or treat each other like animals? Full of beautiful scenery, poetically breathtaking symbolism, animalistic sex and behaviour, and notorious for its faint-inducing scenes involving fish-hooks. But put it all together and you have a dark love story and metaphor about abuse that passes on between people, islands of individuals that connect only through pain, metaphors about fishing lost people out of the waters, and the tragedy of beastly people that don't know any better. Its only flaws are the too frequent scenes of nastiness and the artsy semi-happy ending that isn't visually in line with the rest of this gripping, poetic piece.
Another Kim Ki-Duk creation, but this time unrelentingly brutal and bleak without the typical poetry, subtlety and thought. This is a dense portrayal of several disturbed, neurotic, insane, perverted or violent Korean characters under the shadow of the US presence in South Korea. One woman is insane after being abandoned by an American soldier with an angry and violent son whom everyone hates for being a half-breed. There's a man who lives off killing people's dogs and selling their meat, a girl who got shot in the eye by her brat brother and who has a perverted relationship with her puppy, locals get drugs and porn from the crude Americans, etc. The theme, albeit a weak one, seems to be about cruelty linked to foreign interference, war and a lost modern society after a civil war. The movie is typically gripping and interesting with several striking scenes, but what sinks this one is the terrible acting by the Americans and the over-the-top and forced feel of the events and characters.
Possibly Kim's most difficult and impenetrable work. A rough 'bad guy' from the street becomes obsessed over an innocent upper-class woman who scorns him on a public bench. He cons her into a hard situation then uses it to force her into prostitution, watching her through a one-way mirror while she is raped and humiliated in order to pay her debts. A twisted, violent relationship is formed where he both protects her with his life and keeps her in servitude, and she grows dependent and even amorous. Perhaps it's just me but I found it impossible to penetrate this one. It seems to be saying something about social classes and male-female relationships and roles, but the messages are mixed. Kim himself said this movie was about people forced into social classes based on superficialities and that this confuses and angers him, thus inspiring this movie. A similar theme was covered by Kim's superior but flawed early work: Crocodile.
An old man adopts a lost young girl on his fishing boat, raises her, and plans to marry her as soon as she comes of age. They show gentle love and a soulful relationship without words, despite the objectionable morality of such a setup. His fishing clients rock the boat with their flirtations and bad behaviour, but even more so when a gentle young man captures the heart of the virginal and innocent girl, and makes plans to take her away from the old man who has obviously stopped having her best interests at heart. That's the story at the simplest level. But then there are the many elements of mysticism and symbolism, which could be wrongly taken as purely spiritual metaphor, but I see it as a both fascinating and objectionable human story with a single element of parable: The bow. The bow is the expression of his emotions. He uses it to play music for her and show his affection, and also to jealously drive away potential competition by using it to shoot arrows at them. They communicate through it, she plays with it sometimes, its beauty and violence express his purity and his waywardness respectively, and he even uses it to see into people's futures by shooting it almost through her at a picture of Buddha behind her. Thus, in the surreal ending, the bow serves as an ultimately pure joining between souls, leading to a ridiculous, bizarre but symbolic sex act and orgasm. In other words, yet another challenging Kim Ki-duk creation that finds beauty in twisted morals and strange parables, only this time it's just a bit too objectionable and crude.