2010

   The year 2010 opened with some positive signs for Korean cinema, but there were still few people smiling at the overall state of the Korean film industry. Commercially at least, producers could point to a number of recent successes to justify the claim that local audiences were still interested in Korean films. The spy drama Secret Reunion, for example, pulled in well over 5 million admissions after its Lunar New Year release. And although well told commercial stories have always done fairly well at the box office, even the melodrama Harmony, notable only for its utter lack of restraint in manipulating its audience, managed to pass the 3 million missions mark.

Looking ahead, there is a strong masculine slant to the films slated for release in the next year or two. Thrillers and war movies will be the dominant genre, with comparatively fewer comedies, horror films and romantic dramas. Partly as a result, male stars are in strong demand while there are very few roles available for actresses. Some of the bigger projects in the pipeline include a grisly new thriller from Kim Jee-woon titled I Saw the Devil, Na Hong-jin's follow-up to his acclaimed debut The Chaser, a new period drama from King and the Clown director Lee Joon-ik, a big budget comic book adaptation from director Kang Woo-suk, and a remake of the 1960 classic The Housemaid by Im Sang-soo and starring the great actress Jeon Do-yeon. Smaller scale works that will likely receive wide festival exposure include Lee Chang-dong's Poetry, the 101st film by Im Kwon-taek, and a remake of the 1966 classic Late Autumn to be shot in the US by Kim Tae-yong and starring Chinese actress Tang Wei.

The open question is what will happen to low-budget filmmaking, which in 2009 provided Korean cinema with some of its strongest titles. There is as much directorial talent available as ever, however the government under President Lee Myung-bak has adopted an increasingly hostile stance towards independent filmmaking. With funding evaporating and important distribution channels being shut down, independent cinema will largely have to get by on its own for the near future. Motivation is in no short supply, but with the scaling back of more practical assistance, this year will probably not produce the riches of 2009.    (written on March. 28)

     Reviewed below:     The Fair Love (Jan 14)     Secret Reunion (Feb 4)     Secret Love (Mar 25)     Happy Killers (Apr 8)     Blades of Blood (Apr 28)     The Servant (Jun 2)     The Man from Nowhere (Aug 4)     Enemy at the End (Aug 26)     Bedeviled (Sep 2).

    The Fair Love

Hyung-man (Ahn Sung-ki) is a man in his 50s who leads a lonely, ordered life. He runs a small camera repair shop, and his mastery of this intricate skill draws customers from across the city. He also has a talent for photography, though for him it's more of a hobby than a vocation. He's still single, in fact he has never even dated a woman before. If the world were more fair he would be materially secure, but years earlier one of his best friends took his life savings and ran off. Since then, his life has never been the same.

Therefore he is stunned and flummoxed when his former friend summons him to his deathbed for an unconvincing apology and, on top of that, a request. The man's daughter Nam-eun (Lee Ha-na), now in her 20s, will be alone after he is gone. Would you please stop in every once in a while and check on her, the friend asks. Hyung-man feels rightly that he owes his friend nothing. But the daughter has done him no wrong, and eventually he knocks on her door.

I think it's fair to say that the one line summary of The Fair Love -- a man in his 50s and a woman in her 20s meet, fall in love, and start a relationship -- is not for most viewers especially appealing. (Excepting, perhaps, fifty-year-old men!) But the 34-year-old independent director Shin Yeon-shick (A Great Actor, 2005) presents his story in a thoughtful, nuanced way that encourages you to consider this relationship with an open mind. In some ways you could call this film a love story, in other ways a comedy, but most of all it's simply a portrait of two lonely people and how they choose to deal with the emptiness in their lives. Thanks to two great acting performances and the director's compassionate viewpoint, the story leaves a lasting impression.

The film's first half is particularly memorable, when it introduces us to the characters and the everyday spaces they inhabit. There is something about the camera repair shop -- its myriad tools and objects, and the interactions between the people who work or hang out there -- that is quietly fascinating. There's something that draws you in to Nam-eun's home as well, as empty and ordinary as it is. Most of all, it is the scenes when Hyung-man and Nam-eun are getting to know each other that stick in the mind. There is a subtle energy and tension between these two characters that many melodramas try, and fail, to create. Lee Ha-na's performance, and some well-written dialogue, deserve much of the credit.

The second half presents more of a narrative challenge. What at first strikes us as an unconventional or bizarre coupling eventually comes across as ordinary, as we get to know the two of them better and adopt their perspective. Hyung-man starts to feel and even act like a teenager in love (exhilarating for him, awkward for the viewer). But ultimately they are a couple like any other. The Fair Love retains a realist perspective as it moves towards its conclusion, but the film itself, which felt so fresh in the opening reels, ends on a more conventional note.

The title of this work (in Korean it is simply a transcription of the English) refers not to the "fair" of My Fair Lady, but to the saying, "All's fair in love and war." It's an awkward and thought-provoking title which well reflects the character and strengths of the film as a whole. Is their relationship fair? Are they being fair to each other, and is it "fair play" in terms of society's rules? It's to the film's credit that it never fully answers these questions.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Secret Reunion

Secret Reunion opens with a lengthy, exciting prologue before getting to the heart of its story. Ji-won (Gang Dong-won) is a North Korean spy living incognito in Seoul. Although with his stylish appearance he looks just like any other young member of capitalist society, he misses his wife and yearns to return to the North. For his last mission he is called upon by an older spy to take part in an assassination attempt on a former colleague who has switched sides. At the same time, a South Korean intelligence agent named Han-gyu (Song Kang-ho) catches wind of the plot and sets off on a reckless chase to apprehend the would-be assassins.

In these opening scenes you sense at once the strengths of this film. The pace is brisk and there are many things happening at once, but it is so smoothly directed that each twist in the narrative remains clear. The main characters are given depth by a screenplay that highlights their vulnerabilities and presents them with hard moral choices. It is at turns exciting, funny, suspenseful and sad. Later the action will skip ahead six years, when the two lead characters meet up again under very different circumstances. In this longer segment it's pretty easy to guess where the story is headed, but the film's confident execution and memorable details make it easy to ignore this and just enjoy the ride.

Secret Reunion is a very successful second outing for the young director Jang Hun, who began his career as an assistant to Kim Ki-duk and then made his debut in 2008 with the commercial and critical hit Rough Cut. That film, although smaller in scale, is perhaps more innovative and thought-provoking. Secret Reunion was intended to be a more commercial endeavor from the start, but the fact that it was such a hit with audiences (over 5 million tickets sold) should be enough to push Jang's career into the fast lane. Surely we will be hearing more from him in the near future.

Of course, it will surprise no one to hear that one of the key reasons to watch this film is the performance by Song Kang ho. He portrays Han-gyu as someone pulled in several different directions at once. Although he's not above cheating a bit to get ahead, his conscience continues to follow him around, even if he doesn't acknowledge it outwardly. It's not a major departure from his previous roles, but Song's ability to express himself with his body and his masterly control of his voice keeps the performance fresh. His pairing with Gang Dong-won also seems to have helped the latter turn in an especially engaging and charismatic performance. However in some ways the actor who most stole the limelight was Goh Chang-seok (Director Bong in Rough Cut) who plays a Vietnamese gang boss. Although surely it will be obvious to native speakers of Vietnamese that this is a Korean actor, many local viewers were fooled, at the same time as Goh's delivery and comic timing produced storms of laughter.

Local commentators have noted this film's resemblance to a string of earlier big-budget North Korea-themed blockbusters that scored big at the box office (especially Shiri, JSA, Silmido, Taegukgi, and Welcome to Dongmakgol). Like the earlier works, Secret Reunion includes humanistic portrayals of North Korean characters and focuses on individuals caught in the middle of powerful, impersonal political forces. But this film is on a refreshingly smaller scale, restricting itself to just two protagonists and devoting more time to characterization. The ending may not contain any strong insight into Korea's unique political situation, but the film's characters will endure.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Secret Love

Let's take a look at the opening of Secret Love, shall we? A woman shows up in an airport, to greet her husband's brother. She does not know what he looks like. To her big surprise, the brother is an exact replica of her husband. Yup, they turn out to be twins.

I know what you are thinking. No matter how reckless and rushed the marriage might have been, it is beyond unlikely that she would not know her husband-to-be has a twin brother. Even if he had tried to hide this fact from her, there would be so many ways in which critical information like this would have naturally leaked to her. To say "it strains credibility" is an understatement. And yet, the filmmakers insist that they put in this boneheaded "surprise encounter" scene. What for? So that Yun Jin-seo (Old Boy), playing the wife, could prettily swoon on camera?

From there the movie defines itself into an overblown melodrama revolving around the twins. Now, this in itself is not a problem. It is obvious that director Ryoo Hoon (or screenwriter Kwon Ji-yeon, see below) consciously chose this melodramatic approach in order to tackle a rather abstract thesis about love, which can be summarized into a question, "If I genuinely love someone, what are the reasons for this love?"

Secret Love is, in a nutshell, a story of a woman who falls in love with two outwardly identical men (both played by Yoo Ji-tae, One Fine Spring Day). While the older twin, her husband, lies in a hospital, comatose due to an accident, his younger brother, who missed out the wedding ceremony due to a different accident, returns from Canada. To add insult to injury, both brothers are hiding other secrets from her, making her life even more complicated.

Secret Love could have been a fun film, but clever ideas can get you only so far. To begin with, the protagonist's psychologies as well as the events that render their behaviors understandable are not depicted in any sensible way. In a strange situation like this, to illustrate the attraction between the woman and the younger twin in an even half-convincing manner must require a delicate tuning process. Instead, the audience is regaled with music video montages. A woman sobbing uncontrollably next to a gravely sick husband is, in the next moment, spending some intimate time in a countryside bed & breakfast with her brother-in-law. How did she get from Point A to Point B? We are not sure, as the film never bothers to explain the process involved in the maturation of the relationship.

Meanwhile, the movie's theme begins to separate like a spread of oil slick in the swimming pool from the rest of the movie. It is impossible not to get what the filmmakers are trying to say, as most of the key dialogues are loud, bald declarations of this theme. The whole presentation is so crudely done that we begin to suspect that the filmmakers came up with the theme and the story to explain the four sex scenes they had already filmed.

Given this situation, the actors, attractive as they are, tend to fall victim to the stilted and awkward dialogues. Yun Jin-seo's monotone speech pattern, combined with all this nonsensically declarative stuff she has to mouth, has the effect of making her sound like a grade-schooler competing in a spelling bee contest. Not the most technically accomplished actress, she gets zero help from the director in this regard. Yoo Ji-tae clearly wanted something more challenging than usual, but playing two utterly boring characters probably was not that much more of a challenge than playing one utterly boring character. By the latter half of the movie, you begin to wish that the protagonists get run over by a train, so desperately annoying and turgid they become.

In the spirit of fairness, I must inform the readers that the movie suffered through a change of hand at the helms. Kwon Ji-yeon had started directing his screenplay but pulled out from the project citing "health-related reasons." Yun publicly claimed that it was like performing in two completely different films for her, and confessed that she had "creative differences" with Ryoo over her role. However, there is no real evidence that the Kwon Ji-yeon version would have been clearly superior to the current version. In any case, the audience is given only one completed movie. And it's not good, in any way you slice it.       (Djuna, translated by Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Happy Killers

Happy Killers is based on a mystery short written in 2005 by Seo Mi-ae. It concerns a man in pursuit of a serial killer whose MO involves committing one murder every rainy Thursday. The protagonist is a former hobo, having lost everything due to a business failure. The viewers soon learn that he has personal reasons for tracking down the killer.

The short story is not a bad source material, except that it would have been more suitable for a short film, about the length of an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Turning it into a theatrical feature should have cost a lot of efforts. New subsidiary plots had to be added and the ending given an expanded meaning: otherwise the ending that arrived at the exact right moment in the original would have felt limp and devoid of urgency. For these reasons, I can appreciate the difficulties the screenwriter-director Kim Dong-wook must have had in adapting this short story. What I cannot appreciate is the outcome of such adaptation.

How wrong-headed was it? First of all, the movie belongs to a different genre. The original story is a dark, melancholic mystery: the filmic adaptation is a comedy. That's right, a comedy featuring a serial killer. Now, there is nothing wrong with the idea itself. A narrative can sometimes flourish once it made such an absurd turn. However, what really makes such seemingly absurd choices work is not so much your narrative skills but your attitude. The storyteller must be aware that if the viewers were to take seriously the fictional set-up in which six women are brutally slaughtered, his gaze toward the victims should be invested with at least some amount of genuine emotion. It does not necessarily have to be sympathy, compassion or horror. It could be other types of emotion, tougher to accept for the viewers: the important thing is the minimum attention paid to the victims. In this film, however, nobody cares: the victims are indifferently tossed around as background props to unfunny comedic skits. Call me moralistic or whatnot, but I find this attitude abhorrent.

For the same reason, I find the slacker cop Jeongmin (Kim Dong-wook, not the director), the new protagonist added by filmmakers pushing aside the original's main character, Young-seok (Yu O-seong, The Champion), decidedly unpleasant. He is studying for a public official qualification exam and thus only half-serious about his duties as a cop, but we are not watching this movie to learn about his private life or his degree of professionalism. He has forfeited himself as a reliable hero when all he cares about is taking petty revenge against Young-seok, who publicly accused him of a misdemeanor, while literally treating the victims of the serial killer like used soda cans strewn on the sidewalk. I am sorry but being a central character in a comedy does not mean that he has to be so relentlessly shallow.

The movie itself is teeth-gnashingly boring. As I said, it pays little attention to the victims, which is not only an ethical problem but also reflective of the fundamental confusion in construction of the drama. For close to one hour, the movie keeps following the everyday antics of Young-seok, Jeong-min and Young-seok's daughter, Harin (Shim Eun-gyung, Possessed). Except for a few stabs at certain ultra-conservative newspaper, the so-called jokes range in quality from ho-hum to intolerable.

Apprehending the serial killer becomes a serious issue only after the mid-point. But don't get your hopes up, the Seo Mi-ae story does not get suddenly revived to make the movie exciting. It's way too late for that. You cannot spend more than one hour blubbering about some unrelated stuff, then jump into the real story, and expect the viewer's attention to remain riveted. And of course, whatever suspense or thrill left over from the original is relentlessly dismantled by Detective Jeong-min, a pointless character if there ever was one. My final question is why the filmmakers bothered to purchase Seo's story in the first place. Had they intended from the beginning to make it into a comedy, or was it a desperate measure for those suffering from creative bankruptcy? Is it only me who thinks Seo's honest reaction to this adaptation would be on the line of, "Where is my story, you blockheads?!"       (Djuna, translated by Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Blades of Blood

Even though my day job is teaching history, I am not a stickler for historical accuracy in a motion picture. Filmmakers do have rights to exercise their "dramatic license" when called for, as certainly have the artists working in other art-forms. Having said this, the liberties filmmakers take on the "real" history can range anywhere from seriously misguided (Mississippi Burning's treatment of FBI agents as heroes uncovering racist conspiracies during the civil rights movement, a choice nonetheless famously defended by Roger Ebert) to nakedly propagandistic (Oliver Stone's JFK, not to deny that it is a piece of virtuoso filmmaking) to perversely creative (Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, in which Adolf Hitler finally gets what was coming to him). Sometimes the filmmakers sanitize or romanticize what in history appear to be rather sordid or at least troubling affairs (multiple cinematic versions of Mayerling come to mind) but occasionally their painstaking efforts to recreate the past manage to surpass those of professional historians and journalists in their insights. After watching, say, Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil, any big Hollywood Civil War movie focusing on the larger-than-life Southern generals nobly suffering while grey-uniformed soldiers fall down like autumn leaves around them may appear positively cartoonish.

Setting an extravagant martial-arts action movie in the Joseon dynasty Korea inevitably concedes a certain level of historical distortion, given the firmly civilian nature of the Joseon court and its society, but that should not mean that genre considerations sometimes cannot be given primacy over reality. After all, the real gunfight at the OK corral was, as one historian put it, closer to a '90s drive-by shooting than a Western duel, and the majority of the late Tokugawa samurai were paper-pushers who probably had troubling chopping radishes with their swords, much less cutting down opponents in a single stroke.

Blades of Blood, based on a well-known 1994 graphic novel by Park Heung-yong, is set immediately before and during the first wave of Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea in 1592. Director Lee Jun-ik messes with the time-line even more radically than the original comic, forcing the 1596 revolt led by illegitimate rebel Lee Mong-hak (Cha Seung-won) to take place four years earlier, almost reversing the causal relationship between the Hideyoshi's invasion and the revolt. Lee and the screenwriter team Jo Cheol-hyun, (Possessed) Choi Seok-hwan (Sunny) and O Seung-hyun clearly wanted to argue that the Joseon dynasty court pretty much invited the Japanese invasion, and portray King Seon-jo (played by the rocker-singer Kim Chang-wan), who in real life was a substantial scholar of philology, capable of debating academic points with some of the greatest Confucian scholars of Korean history including Yi Yi, as an idiot full of hot air surrounded by equally venal yangban ministers. Indeed, the filmmakers consciously buck the current trend of making the dialogues in period pieces more elaborate and authentic, and make the characters, including the king, speak in short bursts of contemporary colloquialisms. It's not quite Hamlet intoning, "Yo, Horatio, there be things in uptown and downtown y' know nuthin' about, man," but is still a pretty poor choice. Instead of giving the character's voices immediacy, this strategy tends to make most of them sound vaguely constipated.

Cha Seung-won and Hwang Jeong-min are such great actors that the thespian sparks generated by them more than compensate for director Lee's weak choices in depicting the swordfights, relying on boring slow motions and sudden zooms. Still, Cha and Baek Seong-hyun (Jo Seung-woo's brother in Marathon) are dragged down by the heavily allegorical roles they are stuck with, the latter's revenge campaign against the former taking on the metaphor of the post-'80s-born Korean young struggling under the thumb of the sanctimonious "386" generation. Only Hwang's blind swordsman Jeong-hak is able to slash through the embarrassingly arch dialogues and schematic characterization and draw the viewers into his charismatic performance. Lee's idea of a "progressive" woman character, here Mong-hak's courtesan lover Baek-ji (Han Ji-hye), is to make her speak in cherry-pit-spitting monosyllables: otherwise she might as well be a set decoration, having zero chemistry with either Kyun-ja or Mong-hak.

Technically, Blades of Blood is satisfactory if not startlingly original: Kang Seung-yong's production design makes good use of real locations, while Kim Sang-beom and Kim Jae-beom's editing effectively wrangles crowded action scenes.

Like other recent Lee Jun-ik films, Blades of Blood is competently made but lacks true inspiration. The patented Lee strategy of "contemporization" of the period piece might have worked in King and the Clown and most notably Once Upon a Time in a Battlefield (which may still be Lee's best feature) because they were genuine satires. As soon as Lee begins to take his politics seriously, however, we realize that his approach is basically not that different from that of the old period piece dramas we used to see in TV, shoving their holier-than-thou political and moral lessons down the viewer's throat at the expense of respecting the integrity of the actual past lives. Blades of Blood is not much fun, but it also has little to tell us about the 16th-century Korea, other than that Korea's early modern past is still likely to be seen through the shallow prism of "political relevance" from today's artists.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    The Servant

The Servant got off to a good start at the box office: on its opening weekend it dislodged the US blockbuster Prince of Persia from the top slot. That's no small achievement, since The Servant is not a blockbuster itself; what it mainly has going for it is raciness. Despite its 18 rating, though, it's less overtly sexual than many past art films (A Good Lawyer's Wife, for instance). It doesn't have a lot of violence either, so it lacks the selling points you'd associate with a number one hit.

The Servant is basically a retelling of the popular and oft-filmed Korean story Chun-hyang, through two fairly familiar filters. First, like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, it tells the story from the viewpoint of a character who was marginal in the original, Bang-ja the servant of the young scholar Lee Mong-ryeong. (Hence the Korean title "Bang-ja's Tale," playing off the original "Chun-hyang's Tale.") Second, like John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it purports to tell the "real" story behind the edifying legend, though in this case the reality is at least as edifying as the legend.

The film begins with Lee Bang-ja (Kim Joo-hyeok, My Wife Got Married) meeting the ghostwriter he's hired to write his story. Bang-ja is a well-to-do but shady merchant; the writer incautiously calls him a "gangster," but Bang-ja accepts the label without offense. He recalls how, at the age of thirty, he became servant to Lee Mong-Ryeong (Ryoo Seung-beom, No Mercy). On a visit to a local kisaeng's house, both men are struck by the beauty of the kisaeng's daughter Chun-hyang (Jo Yeo-jeong, The Road Home). Mong-ryeong sends his servant to arrange a date with the girl; he then bursts in and slaps Bang-ja, pretending that the intrusion was his servant's idea. Ryoo plays Mong-ryeong as a goofy but vicious frat boy, sort of a Joseon-era George W. Bush. But Bang-ja turns the tables on his master, beating up a bigger thug who interrupts the scene. Both Chun-hyang and her servant Dan-hyang (Ryoo Hyeon-kyeong) find Bang-ja's prowess quite sexy, but it's Chunhyang whom Bang-ja wants to impress.

Helped by Mong-Ryeong's lecherous houseguest Mr. Ma (O Dal-soo), an aging rake whose "skills" in seduction he passes on to the servant in some very funny scenes, Bang-ja manages to win Chun-hyang's heart. Chun-hyang's mother, and to some extent Chun-hyang herself, have more ambitious plans -- to get Mong-ryeong to marry the girl. Chun-hyang's ambivalence is understandable. She loves Bang-ja, but as any Jane Austen fan knows, love won't pay the bills, and marrying Bang-ja would lower her status, while marrying Mong-ryeong would raise it. Miserably jealous, Bang-ja can't help interfering with the plan, even after he's agreed to help out, just because Chunhyang asked him to. After Mong-ryeong signs a marriage agreement, he's called to Seoul to finish his studies and take the examinations that will determine his career. Bang-ja, left behind, becomes a merchant and continues his relationship with Chun-hyang.

But, deliberately or not, the couple have humiliated not only Mong-ryeong (he lost his girl to a bondservant!) but Hyang-dan (her mistress stole the guy she had her eye on!), which is not a good way to ensure yourself a happy ending. Mong-ryeong's resentment simmers until, having passed his exams and been appointed a state inspector, he meets a debauched young magistrate, Byeon (Song Sae-byeok Mother) assigned to Chun-hyang's town of Namwon, who likes "unusual" women. Mong-ryeong siccs him on Chun-hyang, and the traditional tale unfolds, with Byeon trying to lay claim to the low-class girl he believes likes to be treated rough. The plot thickens as Mong-ryeong and Chun-hyang hatch an intricate plan to advance both their interests, and Bang-ja fumes helplessly on the sidelines as the tale plays itself out.

Some viewers will probably dislike the way The Servant mixes genres, soft-core bawdy comedy stapled to romantic drama/tragedy. It's a common device in Korean films, so it's a common complaint, but I like it, especially when it's well done, as it is here. I admit that the changes of tone can be disorienting, but what keeps the film on course is Bang-ja, who's in love with Chun-hyang from the start, and pursues her single-mindedly throughout. He deals with the raunchy comedy of Mr. Ma's sex tips for boys and the Untold Scandal-style manipulations of Chun-hyang's mother, who wants to sell her daughter to the highest bidder, the same way: he loves Chun-hyang, even though he knows that as a servant he has no rights and no hope, and Kim Joo-hyeok maintains Bang-ja's loyalty and desperation all the way. (As it happens, director Kim Dae-woo wrote the script for Untold Scandal.) Bang-ja isn't a standard-issue hero -- after he does something heroic or romantic he's immediately abashed as he remembers his place, but he can't help himself.

It helps that even the minor characters get their moments to shine, from the pretty servant girl Mr. Ma keeps trying to bed; to the tough guy Bang-ja beat up in front of Chunhyang at the beginning, who becomes his loyal right-hand man; to the palace eunuchs who toy with the new Inspector Mong-ryeong on graduation day; to Magistrate Byeon, who might be the weak point of the story: he's just too dumb and lazy to be a convincing villain. In his big scene with Chun-hyang, when he's trying to excite her by slapping her around, he abruptly recoils and asks if she's mad at him, and it's clear that he'd rather be slapped around himself. If Chun-hyang's mother had completed her erotic education, she'd have commanded "On your knees, worm!" and he'd have submitted completely. Fortunately, Mong-ryeong is all the villain The Servant needs, as Bang-ja is its hero.      (Duncan Mitchel)

    The Man from Nowhere

Tae-sik (Won Bin, Mother) is a pawn-shop owner in a working class neighborhood. Obviously hiding from his past and perhaps his enemies, he shuns normal human contact. His only friend is So-mi (Kim Sae-ron, A Brand New Life), a drug addict's cute and smart-mouthed daughter. When So-mi's mother (Kim Hyo-seo) steals a multi-billion won worth of heroin package from a group of organ-harvesting criminals led by Man-seok (Kim Hee-won) and President Oh (Song Young-chang, Thirst), the killers descend on the mother and daughter like a pack of jackals. With So-mi kidnapped and her corneas about to be scooped away, it is up to Tae-sik, who used to be- surprise, surprise-- a secret government agent a la Jason Bourne, to rescue her.

The Man from Nowhere is marketed as a Won Bin vehicle, in which the pretty-boy actor showcases his "masculine" side as an action star. Directed by Lee Jeong-beom (who also helmed a heavy-handed but interesting Cruel Winter Blues [2005]), The Man from Nowhere uses the familiar template of Hollywood blockbusters like Man on Fire to combine grueling depictions of the criminal exploitation of the society's weak (especially children) and a star-driven action fantasy of a super-powerful hero mercilessly dispatching scumbags. The result is decidedly mixed.

In fact, Won Bin acquits himself well. Other than the Christian Bale-like basso profundo voice that sounds completely fake, he anchors his action-star antics firmly in the emotional damages Tae-sik suffered, surprisingly effective in both the scenes in which the latter vacantly expresses existential despair and those in which he fearfully withdraws from paternal intimacy with So-mi. Kim Sae-ron also gives an excellent performance for the most part, alternatively tough and needy, without ever becoming maudlin. The bad guys are, if not startlingly original, at least more energetic and colorful than usual. The "action" itself, other than requisite bows to the Bourne series, is interestingly designed as well: it eschews the flamboyant, acrobatic style of a Hong Kong film and emphasizes restrained, almost intimate body contacts of Southeast Asian martial arts, culminating in a vicious duel with Man-seo's Viet Namese bodyguard (Thai actor Thanayong Wongtrakul). It fits rather well with the basically morose and pessimistic character Won Bin plays.

Unfortunately The Man from Nowhere is brought down by its almost repellently bleak outlook, which renders the film excessively gory as well, and its belated concessions to the star-vehicle expectations. In the latter half, Tae-sik simply becomes an undying killing machine, albeit with sorrowful doe eyes, mouthing off badly written one-liners with increasingly greater violence but less and less conviction. A similar process of devolution happens to So-mi, who seems to have dropped parts of her brain somewhere when she had been kidnapped: all of her dialogues in the second half consist of questions addressed to other characters ("Are you going to really kill me?" "Have you come to rescue me?" and so on and on).

As in his previous film, director Lee seems unable to avoid heavy-handedness, which does give the film a certain level of authenticity, but also robs it of a sense of grace and beauty, leaving the climactic surge of emotion more belabored than it should be. In the final analysis, nonetheless, The Man from Nowhere is not too bad as a star vehicle for proving Won Bin's appeal to the action-film demographic. It could have been much worse: he could have been stuck in 71: Into the Fire.     (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Enemy at the End

The year is 1984. Min-ho (Yu Ha film regular Cheon Ho-jin) is a fifty-something brain disease patient rusticating in a slightly run-down, out-of-the-way Catholic hospital. The left side of his body paralyzed and suffering from bouts of depression, the only thing he can work up enough energy for is outwitting the kind and pretty nurse Ha (TV personality Seo Hyo-rim) so that he could commit suicide. One day, a deep-sea fisherman Sang-eop (Yoo Hae-jin, Tazza, Truck, Woochi, et al) with a grave head injury is admitted to his room. A victim of a vicious robbery attempt, Sang-eop has lost most of his memories and is virtually paraplegic, albeit slowly recovering. The situation is drastically changed when Min-ho one day remembers where he knows his roommate's name from. This makes him suddenly recover his appetite for life. You see, Min-ho is determined to kill his bed-neighbor. And he will do it by hook or by crook¡¦

Enemy at the End is a strangely ambitious witch's brew with frankly incompatible elements thrown in together. The movie is structured like a British-style boardroom thriller (the core of the film is essentially two semi-incapacitated patients glaring and hollering at one another) but also incorporates into itself elements of absurdist comedy, excessively gory slasher-horror, and even paranoid medical sci-fi. Needless to say, the resultant clashing tonalities don't make for a harmonious rendering of music: the film goes literally berserk in the last fifteen minutes or so, becoming an Eli Roth-torture porn take on Deathtrap, and then throwing a jaw-dropping "last revelation" at the viewers, cleverly orchestrated for sure but ending the movie in a jarring note severely incongruous with the whacky humor of the early sections.

On the positive side, Enemy at the End is never boring or listless. It does have two remarkable actors, Cheon Ho-jin, strikingly handsome even in his "crushed late-middle-age weakling" mode, and Yoo Hae-jin, here crunching his eyes into reptilian slits and shooting off venomous and vulgar bons mots like spitballs, squaring off against one another, which at the very least guarantees some serious thespian fireworks. In fact, the rookie directors Jo Won-hee and Kim Sang-hwa handle Min-ho's simultaneously ingenious and hapless efforts to destroy Sang-eop (and the latter's deadpan response to them) impressively well: they are cringe-inducing but uproariously funny. Had they been able to either put two or three more sequences like the whole "soap-in-panty-stocking" episode or maintain the same tone throughout the film, Enemy at the End could have been a truly unique experience. As it stands, unfortunately, the film is smart and fun but marred by some glaring flaws, most importantly lack of directorial restraint and control over its wilder aspects. Still, like another '80s-set mystery thriller Paradise Murdered (2007), Enemy at the End deserves kudos for trying hard to be different while not cheating the viewers with non-existent clues or a thematic cop-out.

The technical specs are quite good if not overwhelming, from DP Choe Chan-min's (Private Eye) colorful cinematography to the stylishly grungy production design and the effective make-up jobs on Cheon and Yoo.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Bedeviled

Hae-won (Ji Seong-won, TV drama Yi-san) is a middle-rank officer working in a Seoul bank. A severe, tense single woman, she is being brought down by the work-related stress and the hypercompetitive, misogynistic environment she finds herself in. Desperate, she takes up an offer from a long-forgotten friend and takes off for a private vacation in Mundo, a desolate Southern island in which she had spent childhood. Arriving at the island, she is warmly welcomed by Bok-nam (Seo Young-hee, The Chaser, To Sir with Love), her erstwhile best friend. The latter, however, is literally chained to a hideously exploitative marriage with Man-jong (Park Jeong-hak, Musa, Truck), a rattlesnake-like wife-beater, and being sexually abused by Cheol-jong (Bae Seong-woo), his cretinous brother. When Bok-nam finally resolves to escape the island with her daughter in tow, whom she suspects of being molested by her husband, the situation becomes truly dire.

Kim Ki-duk's former assistants are doing quite well these days. Jang Hoon made the macho-swagger-intoxicated but nonetheless fascinating Rough Cut, and now Jang Cheol-soo, who did second-units for The Samaritan Girl and The Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, makes an equally impressive feature film debut with Bedeviled, a fan favorite at the 2010 Pucheon Fantastic Film Festival. While the film makes for a fascinating comparison with Kim's Isle (2000), given their less-than-stable female characters residing in isolated, water-bound locations, Jang in significant ways turns Kim's usual obsessions on their heads, shifting the central points of view from those of typical Kim Ki-duk-style (male) protagonists seeking redemption or transcendence through their abject (sexual or otherwise) behavior to those of the victimized women.

It is not difficult to find in Korean literature or cinema the kind of stories in which a woman is subject to abuse, exploitation, violence and insults, sometimes culminating in the absolute denigration of her most basic right as a human being. And yet, in most of these stories, Korean women simply suffer, continue to suffer and suffer some more, especially in the oh-so-venerated works of high-class literature. The women, no matter how awfully persecuted, must not wreak vengeance on the men, brandishing a sickle, a hoe and other agricultural implements as choice tools of vivisection. Now that would just make the whole thing into a cheap horror film, wouldn't it? Yet in Bedeviled, that's exactly what Bok-nam does: biting, stabbing, slashing, gouging and pounding to death her tormentors. In this case the "cheap horror film" outcome happens to be the exactly logical response. Bedeviled is so honest in presenting this narrative that the viewers, regardless of their gender, are likely to experience a simultaneous sense of catharsis and repulsion cranked up to the nth degree, unable to judge Bok-nam as morally despicable but physically horrified by her relentless destructive campaign nonetheless. And unlike in so many Korean genre films, director Jang refuses to compromise and substitute its devastating ending and thoughtful coda with a Halloween-style, evil-never-dies cop-out denouement or yet another round of preachy bullcrap about how it is all society's fault.

Indeed, despite gore-hound's likely imprimatur, another surprising thing about Bedeviled is just how well-put-together it is. DP Kim Ki-tae and Lighting Director Nam Jin-a's cinematography mercilessly expose the sun-grilled, dark hides of the island folks but also capture the otherworldly beauty of the isolated landscape. Choi Kwan-young's screenplay provides a strong backbone of a narrative with powerful motivations and lean and mean characterizations, and director Jang never resorts to red herrings or faint motions to keep the viewers "engaged," while inserting a few truly breathtaking shots that perfectly resonate with the narrative content without being overly symbolic. One such shot shows Hae-won's supine body transforming into the Mundo island itself: another eerie, potent scene in which Bok-nam stares at the sun in the potato field even evokes Kim Dong-in's classic story "Potatoes" (1925). Unlike in the unfortunate I Saw the Devil, however, these artistic and aesthetic elements never try to disguise the thoroughly unpretentious, in-your-face, tearing-limb-from-limb, honest-to-goodness horror stuff.

Finally, the film benefits greatly from superb performances of not only its lead actress, Seo Young-hee as Bok-nam, but also from a variety of supporting players essaying an impressive range of hypocrisy, imbecility and sheer vileness. Seo has come to specialize in portraying vulnerable, insecure women with overly sensitive disposition, but Bok-nam is definitely more than typecasting. She is absolutely convincing not only as a perennial victim but as a hannya-like female demon whose superego has been shredded into wood chips. You do believe that this fragile, trembling object of domestic violence can, at the next moment, wield a huge mallet and crack a grown man's skull like a watermelon. Among the supporting players, the super-veteran Baek Su-ryeon (also striking in The Man from Nowhere) as Bok-nam's mother-in-law deserves a special mention. In a way, Haewon, a viewer stand-in, is the most schematic character in the movie and Ji Seong-won's performance suffers somewhat as a result, but her restrained acting in the bookend sequences set in Seoul is quite good. It is in fact one of the notable achievements of Bedeviled that the movie plays fair to Haewon's character and never denounces her for "neglecting" Bok-nam.

There are a few obvious problems in the movie. There is a noticeable "gap" in the narrative near the climax, making us wonder if some scenes were hurriedly removed for pacing or other reasons. One minor character, a "coffee girl" (Lee Ji-eun), disappears in the mid-point without explanation. Ultimately, though, Bedeviled is one of those rare species of cinematic animal: a straightforward genre film that, without assuming condescending or instrumentalist attitudes toward its own genre conventions, dares to address the suppressed fantasies and realities that other "arthouse" or "mainstream" films are too chicken-shit to take on. Highly recommended, and not just for fans of extreme horror cinema.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

Koreanfilm.org, last updated September 1, 2010.