Time (2006)

Time (Kim Ki-duk, 2006)
Korean Title: Shi gan

Kim Ki-duk's thirteenth film Time opens with a montage of nearly unwatchable footages of an ongoing plastic surgery. The face is literally mangled, punctured, and mashed; fat flows from the tubes that pass through the inanimate body. It is the same video that is shown to a distraught Seh-hee (Park Yi-geon) before she finally decided to commit to plastic surgery and changing her appearance permanently. The pre-credit sequence takes a form of a caution both to the eager plastic surgery customer and also to Kim's audience. The film, while serving a perfunctory role as a scathing commentary on Korea's fetishism with plastic surgery, suggests something deeper, something more universal.

It starts out like a parable with Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo) and his girlfriend for two years Seh-hee. Seh-hee feels that Ji-woo is getting bored with her; to the point that she orders Ji-woo to think of another woman just to get him aroused enough to sleep with her. One day, Seh-hee disappears without telling Ji-woo. We know that she has opted to change her face, but in Ji-woo's mind, she just left her. Episodic sequences reveal to us Ji-woo's unsuccessful attempts to find love. A rather memorable attempt involves an unattractive lady Ji-woo hooks up with in a blind date; the end of the date is so poignantly conceived furthering Kim's angry accusations of the Korean male population's inability to see beauty within.

Ji-woo does manage to hook up with a new girl, See-hee (Seong Hyeon-a), the new waitress in his favorite coffee shop. His unresolved romance with Seh-hee pervades this new interest; and despite the fact that Seh-hee and See-hee are one and the same person, the sudden change in physical attributes allude to a difference in persona. This may come off as utterly fantastical, as plastic surgery can only change so much and it also invites factual inconsistencies such as lovers of two straight years would have something more to discern each other than mere hand sizes and former pictures. Yet, this is a Kim Ki-duk film and it is also widely recognizable that Kim expands reality the way he makes a man disappear in 3-Iron (2004), or an arrow fly high to the heavens in The Bow (2005), or the self-inflicted violence in The Isle (2000), or the hurtful misogynism in Bad Guy (2001). In Time, Kim suggests plastic surgery as more than just physical change; such modifies the human core that all that is left from the past life are mere symbols and signifiers.

However, Time feels very different from Kim's later films (beginning with Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... Spring (2003) to The Bow). It doesn't dabble in existentialist subtleties or Orientalist philosophies. The film is as blunt as a sledgehammer and is as obvious as your favorite fairy tale. It takes its cautionary tale to excessive lengths, that it hurts Kim's more elusive attempts to say something deeper. I'm one of those who has an affinity with Kim's more silent features. There's always a sense that Kim's attempt to go back to his pre-Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... Spring ouvre can't really be definitely distinguished from the artist he has become. Time stands midway being dragged by Kim's opposite goals of provocation and meditation.

There were sequences which I thought were utterly sublime and consistent with Kim's ability to expand the natural dimensions of reality to propose something poetic --- Ji-woo and Seh-hee's lovemaking scene near the beginning where the latter forced the former to think of another girl (it's as painfully emotional to see lovemaking delegated as mere satisfaction); the breathtaking scenes in the sculpture park (the magnificent statues depict time in its most destructive and rejuvinating way, with the tide burying most of the statues in seawater only to reappear new yet the same --- as opposed to the characters' will to stop time by completely modifying their physical attributes); See-hee's desperate attempts to search for Ji-woo (the Cinderella twist to the runaway lover as the crystal shoe is replaced by the perfect hand).

However, all the episodes I liked are drowned by the inconsistent sentimentality and questionable resulting decisions by the main characters (and Kim): the sudden decision for what seems to be a pay-back by Ji-woo (he begs the plastic surgeon to take over his mental faculties and decide for him); the questionable inability for confrontation (it seems that love is as facile as their physical modifications, thus turning their relationship into a hide and seek game); and the overachieving conclusion that unsuccessfully suggests the continuum of the misfortunes from these neverending adventures to the plastic surgeon.

The Isle (2000)

The Isle (Kim Ki-duk, 2000)
Korean Title: Seom

It was The Isle that elevated Kim Ki-duk to international acclaim. The Isle is Kim's fifth entry to a filmography that consists primarily of films which may be bluntly be considered misogynist and cruel. The Isle tops almost everything that Kim showed in previous efforts such as Bad Guy (2001) and Birdcage Inn (1998), with an almost silent-tale of a weird romantic interlude between a mute proprietress (Jung Suh) of a fishing resort and one of the guests, a criminal (Kim Yoo-suk) being hunted down by the police.

Perhaps more shocking than the entire pic are the individual images and scenes that made the film achieve its art cult status. There's an array of scenes that seems to gratuitously show cruelty to animals: a fish is caught and its fleshed made into fresh sashimi and then thrown back to the lake as it swims its bloody body to safety, several fishes are mashed and haphazardly chopped to death, a frog is caught and brutally skinned and fed to a bird, the same bird is then drowned, a dog is beaten without any reason.

However, more shocking are the individual scenes that concern the actions of the two main characters. In an effort to evade police patrolmen searching the floating houses for escaped criminals, the guest swallows four fishing hooks and hides inside a hole which serves as the house's lavatory. The same way, in an effort to call the attention of the guest who suddenly left the floating house one morning, the proprietress inserts fishing hooks inside her vagina. The scenes are shocking and instantly calls for attention and interpretation. Kim's shock cinema isn't clearly meant for gratuitous entertainment nor plot movement, but for symbolism and deep interpretation.

As cryptic as the scenes of cruelty is the ending. The floating house drifts from the lake to what seems like a vast ocean. Then cuts the concluding image of the man entering a solitary isle of lake grass and disappears therein. Kim zooms out the image, revealing the naked body of the proprietress and the same grassy isle in the place where the vagina (or more accurately, the pubic area) should be. It's an excruciatingly open-ended conclusion that is pregnant with many interpretations. Is Kim trying to wash away his misogynistic artistry by telling his audience that men are the weaker sex and that they merely hide their weakness using the female body? More far-fetched but more interesting is the idea that the final scene shows an exact opposite of a woman giving birth --- with the male entering the uterus, it's a skewed imagery of motherhood but the setting (the proprietress, naked and submerged in water) suggests the validity of the theory.

In the end, The Isle is indeed a compelling yet misguided romance. The boy and the girl spend more time away from each other, using the glare of the sunlight being thrown by a mirror to communicate. Kim's direction suggests an outward alienation. The proprietress is mostly seen from outside a glass window, or when she is interacting with other human beings, she is mostly mute, and blank faced. Even when she's paid for sex, it's automatic and slightly cruel. More interesting is the fact that when the two find themselves together, it usually erupts in violence.

It's an unsettling relationship that developed from an understanding that the two or more different than they are similar. Both of them are manipulative but they jive because there is an understanding that their relationship requires that they both use each other, for sex, for survival, for escape. Kim suggests that within that lake resort where men seek solitude or an escape from the world, the most basic and most accurate of sexual politics between the man and the woman can be derived, as emphasized by the imperfect and mutated relationship between the proprietress and the man who is hiding from his past.