Dir.: Kim Ki-duk

Tied with Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring as my favourite Kim Ki-duk film. A quiet, mysterious, sporadically violent tale of love on the run that gradually turns into something spooky, poetic and ultimately sublime. So lyrical in its wordlessness that it's practically a dance piece. The kind of film that just doesn't belong to this Universe.

Is Cinema still an art form? It should be! It should always be about Human expression, a way of Mankind transcending itself. But the sad truth is that these days almost anyone can make a 'movie'. However, every once and a while there comes a film, a genuine piece of Art that restores my faith and love for the power and beauty of Cinema. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is one of those films.



This is a film of an extremely rare beauty. Visually stunning, from Spring to Winter you feel pulled into that place and you almost feel like you're actually there. That's how brilliant Kim Ki-duk is. There is one single location (the lake), no characters' names and almost no plot at all (one single piece of paper would probably be enough) and still, this is such a mind-opening piece of work. A reflection on life and its constant changes, full of symbolisms and with the Buddhist life philosophy in background. From childhood and its innocence, to youth and its complexity and finally 'grown up' life and its solitude. I loved the way the monk changes when he leaves the lake. Leaving as a kid in love and returning as a murderer from the 'world of men', like his master called it. The main message in my opinion. Nature vs. 'The world of Men'...

Let's face it. Asian Cinema has something that no one else has. I'm not sure what is it, I don't think anyone does, but I do know that I had never seen the essence of life captured on film, like Kim Ki-duk managed. A Masterpiece!

"It is an instinctive desire to seek for novelties.
It is human to endure the passage of time.
It is specific to love to find novelties among repeated routines.
It is life to realize that nothing lasts forever in the passage of time."

Kim Ki-duk



Kim Ki-duk's 13th film, Time, marks the director's return to what was the essence of his early films: the bold, sometimes harsh commentary on contemporary Korean society. The gruesome opening images of plastic surgery that play during the film's opening credits free anyone who hasn't read the film's plotline of any doubts as to what theme he tackles here. Kim makes sure that he shocks his audience - or at least its majority - the soonest possible, which I found to be a striking, honest and utterly effective way to start a film.

One of the main characters of Time, Seh-hee (Ji-Yeon Park), has a problem. She thinks her boyfriend, Ji-woo (Jung-woo Ha), who she's been with for two years, is somehow slowly starting to lose interest in her, and she believes it's because of her physical appearance. Convinced that he is getting tired of her "same boring face", the irrational and obsessive Seh-hee makes the drastic decision to disappear from his life without warning and undergo extensive plastic surgery. Against his better judgment, a plastic surgeon agrees to operate and Seh-hee - who is remarkably beautiful - tells him that her goal is not to become prettier but to be transformed into a completely new person.

Six months later - the time it takes to fully recover from a plastic surgery - Seh-hee reemerges as See-hee (now played by Seong Hyeon-a), a beautiful, smiley and friendly waitress at the same cafe she and Ji-woo used to go to, and proceeds to seduce him all over again as someone else. Soon, after she's secured him, she realizes that she can't figure out what is worse - him longing for her old self, not being able to fully forget her or the idea that he could move on without her and find bliss with whom he believes is someone else.

Time requires a proper understanding of just how popular cosmetic surgery is in South Korea. A recent estimate reckoned 50% of women in their 20s have gone under the knife, and a growing number of men, too, to achieve the goal of ul-jjang, a perfect face. This isn't just movie stars getting implants or doing facelifts, it's regular, anonymous Korean citizens who are literally obsessed with plastic surgery. Behind this trend is a very ancient idea: that a physical transformation can change the way a person sees her, or himself. It can bring new life to a romantic relationship or stem the tide of aging. At least that is what marketers of cosmetic surgery sell: "Have a procedure, heal for six months, and things will be different".

While, in essence, Time may sound like an in-depth look at the alarming increase in popularity of plastic surgery in South Korea, the film itself quickly transforms (much like the main character) into something entirely different - a surreal study of love and time with an inventive backdrop and creative art direction that add layers to the drama. Time's imagery pay thematic and visual homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill, and the spirit of the two Davids (Lynch and Cronenberg), altough certainly not a retread of any of the men's works. Completely original, Time is Kim's most fascinating and maddening puzzle.

Still, despite all the inspiration it draws from Western cinema, Time is still a Kim Ki-duk film. Meaning, it's a strange film. While it seems to play around with the issue of how society influences and defines how beauty should be perceived, it also encompasses the extreme lengths one might go in order to keep someone they love. While some (myself included) might say Seh-hee is a little paranoid and insecure in the beginning of the film, a character that makes it very hard for us to like her, her transformation later in the film not only redefines her, but also takes away some of her identity as well. This eventually comes back to haunt her as well as Ji-woo later the film.

Although it's no Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, Time is another film whose look approaches visual poetry. Kim's trend of having excellent cinematography present within his films remains, as well as choosing great settings for his films to take place in. Even though the film's environments are repeated often (the cafe, and a sculptures park), each revisit is a delight to view because you can tell Kim put a lot of time and effort into each scene. Few modern filmmakers are as adept at crafting a haunting image as Kim. He has a way of grounding the weirdness of a situation in a concrete, comprehensible vision like I'm afraid no one can right now.

The film moves at a reasonable pace, and it was quite enjoyable - suprisingly enjoyable, actually, because one doesn't watch a Kim Ki-duk film with an enjoyment or entertainment purpose. The plot was filled with mystery and intrigue, and it kept me on my toes just trying to figure out the whole weird situation these characters are in. The acting was quite convincing, although at times I wondered why certain characters would take such drastic actions, and then I began to realize that people really do this type of outrageous stuff in real life, so it began to make sense.

It wouldn't be far-fetched to say that this is Kim Ki-duk's second most accessible film. Anyone who has seen a reasonable amount of his other films knows that they can be either overly dark or violent (which, in my case, is rarely a bad thing), but Time doesn't fall into neither of these categories. Like all of Kim's films, there is an underlying theme present, in this particular case, identity and individuality within society. To change one's identity in order to please another person will, in due time, confuse the identity of the one who changed in the first place, and Kim displays this ideology greatly, effectively raising questions while leaving the audience to come to their own conclusions.

Time now seats at number three in my favourites of Kim Ki-duk's filmography. As for the man himself, my admiration and fascination keeps reaching higher and higher levels and his work inspiring and enlightening me each time I lay eyes on it.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.



There are no shades of grey in Kim Ki-duk's world, it's a black and white world of good and evil, although the two extremes are often difficult to separate. Films like The Isle and Bad Guy, in his early career, were violent and disturbing works, shocking and often sordid psycho-sexual melodramas.

The genius of this man doesn't lie there, but in the fact that he would, just a couple of years after that, shock and suprise everyone who called him a misogynist, by making two of the most poetic and visually arresting films of the 21st century: the very restrained and silent Buddhist fable Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring and then, a year later, the phantasmal and melancholy love story 3-Iron. There was violence in these films too but that remained mostly in background and was always shown in an oblique and artistically mature manner. Samaria - Silver Bear winner at the '04 Berlin Film Festival - continues the same tradition of those two films, although it somehow adds a certain amount of his early career's rawness. It's a film that moves and affects you one minute, only to utterly shock you the next.

As embodied in the child Buddhist monk in Spring..., for Kim even innocence holds innate the seeds of corruption. In Samaria, the innocence is that of two young beautiful schoolgirls, Yeo-jin and Jae-young. In order to save money to escape to Europe, the two best friends resort to prostitution, luring clients on the internet who are in no doubt about their underage status. Similarly to Spring..., the film is divided into three distinct segments:

The first, "Vasumitra", starts with one of girls reciting the mythical story of an Indian prostitute of the same name, whose clients turned devout Buddhist after having sex with her. The film then goes on to make a violent mockery of this naive and sentimental belief in the nurturing and spiritual potential of sexuality, as we see Yeo-jin (Ji-min Kwak) 'managing' the 'transactions', procuring the clients and keeping look-out for police while Jae-young (Min-jeong Seo) has sex with her middle-age clients in downtown motels. The events come to tragic conclusion when Jae-young jumps off from a window and dies following a surprise police raid.

In the second part, "Samaria", which gives the film its title - essentially a metaphor, a bizarre, yet brilliant perversion of the Christian myth of "the good Samaritan" - Yeo-jin decides to atone for her sins, to make-up for what has happened to her friend and undo the harm that has been done. She goes back through each one of the clients, sleeping with them and paying them back the money they had been saving. The courage of her gesture moves these men to reconsider the evil of their actions, hence the Samaritan metaphor. The situation gets complex when the girl's father, a police detective who is still recovering from his wife's death, comes to know about the sordid degradation that his daughter is subjecting herself to. He becomes obsessed and starts stalking the men and finally murders one of them in a typically brutal manner.

Finally, the third - and most beautiful - segment, "Sonata", tries to tie everything together. The father and daughter go on an idyllic vacation through the countryside to visit her mother's grave, and try to confront their own inner demons without telling each other anything. The film ends bafflingly when the father, after giving his daughter preliminary driving lessons, leaves her alone and surrenders himself to the police. But only after he has seen his daughter crying silently in the night, and thus making sure of her essential virtuousness.

The film itself, as you can gather from the above, works not so much on a realistic and plausibility level but more in a metaphoric and thought provoking way, even though the film itself uses realism in its storytelling to convey unfolding events. The camera mainly stays handheld, which gives the film an intensity and the feel that you are never quite sure what will happen next, which is especially evident during the middle part of the film where we begin to follow the father. The film also uses natural sound which, along with Kim's usually gorgeous cinematography, makes it another feast for the eyes.

The acting is also exceptional, not least by the father, played by Eol Lee, whose pain we can feel just by his facial expression throughout. Starting out as the loving single parent, his journey takes him through the darkest days of parenthood as he watches his daughter grow up in the most alarming of ways. The two girls also put in strong performances, especially Ji-min Kwak, the "samaritan girl". Given more speaking opportunities that we would normally expect in a Kim Ki-duk film (in 3-Iron for example, neither of the main characters actually speaks) it is refreshing to see that he changes around this formula and is not typecast by the unique skill he has for telling a story in images alone.

Again, Kim Ki-duk (who's a Catholic himself) tries to overlap Buddhist teaching with Catholic dogma and the two completely fail to blend, giving out contradictory messages. Jae-young identifies with an Indian holy prostitute who brings men closer to God by having sex with them. Yeo-jin, on the other hand, likes to hear her father's stories of saints and miracles and comes to believe that her actions by sleeping with the men will redeem the wrongs that have been done. There are few directors who so vigorously cling to certain themes and explore them through different situations as Kim does in his films.

Samaria has both a depressing and pessimistic feeling towards human nature and this refreshing sense of hope, combined with an astute eye for social detail (13 and 14 year-old girls having sex like they're adults) and aesthetic composition. This is one of the most profoundly moving and strangely transcendent tales of guilt, original sin and innocence lost in recent cinema. In one of its many metaphoric images of intruded-upon (and violated) landscape, in the film's final shot, the errant sight of a wobbling, out of control car struggling to chase a sports utility vehicle through a flooded gravel road in the rural countryside, doggedly navigating the inhospitable terrain using an innate compass that elusively, but transfixedly, points home. A beautiful, beautiful film.

Kim Ki-duk tackles, for the first time, a 'little' subject called war. The result is, naturally, an immensely powerful, raw and brilliant film called Address Unknown.



Needless to say, this isn't a war film. Not at all... It's more like a reflection on its casualties, wether they're emotional, physical or social. A realization (a pretty damn obvious one) that war has no 'winners'. That the only thing that comes from it is suffering, nothing else. Kim Ki-duk takes us to a place - a rural slice of the Korean backwoods - that knows nothing but violence and war. Most of the people who live there never actually experienced it, but they have to live day-by-day with its 'legacy'. Why? Simple, because their village happens to be near an American army base built in the beggining of the Cold War.

Everyone in that God-forsaken place is wretched to some degree. But among them are three teenagers who are particularly damaged: Chang-guk, a 'half-breed', whose African American father (a former US soldier) deserted him seventeen years earlier, who lives with his mother on a bus and works for a drunken dog-meat butcher/merchant; Ji-heum, a timid painter's assistant whose father was injured in the war and who gets bullied on a day-to-day bases by two wannabe punks who buy porn from the base soldiers and Eun-ok, a young girl who lost an eye in a stupid childhood accident - the film's opening scene - daughter of a condecorated war hero who died in battle and who'll find on an american soldier in the need of a 'sweerheart' a chance for a desperately eagered eye surgery.



The three of them never really form any kind of friendship, except for the half-Korean and the painter and even with the subtle love story between Ji-heum and Eun-ok. The first half of the film is a detailed look at each of them separately, but when they do connect... it's like there's some sort of karmic reason that brought them together. They're completely different. Their problems, their families, their dreams... and at the same time, they're the same. Three lonely kids suffering the consequences of their country's political mistakes, of something that happened even before they were born... Three kids in a desperate need of love and acceptance.

Kim Ki-duk's anti-war message is simply sublime. Manages to NOT be an anti-american one, even thought obviously isn't 'nice' to them. I mean no one likes to see their country occupied... right? Still, the way he also manages to show that soldiers, those who are away from home, sent there by their 'bosses' for something they don't understand, aren't really the ones to blame - on a certain scene, where they train, crawling in the floor, the soldier at one point screams: "Where's the fucking enemy? We're the enemy!" - is equally applaudable.

Not that any fan, or anyone who's minimally familiarized with Kim Ki-duk's work needs it, but I still feel compelled to leave a little warning: this isn't (AT ALL) an easy film to watch. There's dogs being beaten to death with a baseball bat (even though the film starts with a message saying "No animal was harmed in any way during the making of this film") and the film itself is pure, pure tragedy. Again, that won't frighten anyone who knows Kim. I mean, this is the man who actually shot a scene where the lead puts fish hooks up her vagina and yanks most of her insides out (The Isle), so I know those who know what I'm talking about will prepare themselves. Anyone else should probably consider themselves warned... Watching this film will never be an 'enjoyable' experience. An eye-opening one? Probably. A swirl of emotions? Definately!

I admit, I wasn't even going to rate this film this high but, probably due to my endless admiration for its creator, I found it extremely hard not to... Far from the excellence of 3-Iron and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring but also incomparably better than Bad Guy or The Coast Guard, the film has its flaws, yes. Both technical and aesthetical ones. The laughabe, distractingly bad performaces by the american actors (especially Mitch Mahlum) are particularly regrettable - the only possible explanation is that they casted real US soldiers.

If it wasn't for that and the obvious 'americanization' the film had to endure, I'm sure I wouldn't resist... I would call it a masterpiece.

Not Kim Ki-duk's best work. Which isn't really saying much, considering he can't make a bad film. Hard to watch, as usual. Uncompromising, unpleasant and emotionally brutal. A twisted love story of emotional bondage, desire, violence, revenge, and obsession played out against a map of sex and love.

Since the revelation of his serene Buddhist parable Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, Kim Ki-duk has been working toward a quiet, minimalist aesthetic that's more in sync with untouched nature than the loudness of the modern world. Though it lacks the humor and complexity of recent Kim efforts like 3-Iron and Time, The Bow benefits from a gratifying simplicity of form, unfolding more through long stares and ritualistic gestures and sounds than the few pages of expository dialogue that string it together.



While a major plot hole breaks the film's internal logic at the mid point and keeps it from reaching quite as high as 3-Iron, The Bow is clearly the work of a master at the top of his game, a stylistic companion piece to 3-Iron that rounds out a thematic trilogy with Samaritan Girl and Spring, Summer.

The film continues Kim's often troubling, complex exploration of morality, picking up fragments of ideas and textures from both Samaritan Girl and Spring, Summer. It tells the story of 60 year-old man (Seong-hwang Jeon), who 'found' a 6 year-old girl (Han Yeo-reum, Samaritan Girl) ten years previously and has been raising her on his deep sea fishing boat for the past ten years. She has agreed that, when she reaches the age of 17, the old man can marry her. The two lead characters - both unnamed - live a quiet, isolated, completely non-verbal life on the man's boat where the girl's only contact with the outside world comes in the form of men who rent the boat for fishing trips. The old man ferries these clients to and from shore, the girl never leaves the boat.

If you find the premise a little troubling, a little uncomfortable, that's good. You should. There's something vaguely incestuous about the relationship and it immediately raises a handful of difficult questions. What sort of man confines a young girl away from society, raising her from childhood for the purpose of later marrying her? Where does one 'find' a girl to raise in this fashion in the first place? And why on earth have none of the men who have rented his boat for years - and who clearly know about the strange relationship - never bothered to treat these questions as anything more than a curiosity?

While it would be simple for Kim to demonize the old man, his morality is more complex than that, and the questions he wants to raise more subtle. Although the bizarre nature of their relationship is unsettling through outside eyes, there is no denying that the girl seems perfectly happy with her life in the early going and there is also no denying that the men from the outside world who use the remoteness of their location as an excuse to try to rape her come off looking incomparably worse than the old man, who has never touched the girl in a sexual, disrespectful way. Kim, at least at first, seems to be suggesting that while their living arrangements are certainly unusual and possibly immoral they are certainly no worse than what too often passes for 'civilized' behavior. He doesn't make any statement, he just puts the actions in front of our eyes and lets us make up our own minds.

The 12th feature in Kim's prolific career, The Bow directly recalls his festival breakthrough The Isle, another tale of shifting power dynamics set in the isolation of the sea. Perhaps in keeping with his newfound Buddhist aesthetic, the new film isn't nearly as graphic and frank in its sexuality, nor does it insist on the obvious moral sticking points. In the end, this relationship is as removed from the norm as an anchored ship from shore, and Kim succeeds again in creating a world all his own.

In the opening of the film, the girl knows nothing but the ocean, the kindness and protection of the old man, and the crude gropings of visiting fishermen. She is quietly, radiantly happy, imbued with an elemental, otherworldly beauty that comes from the pure simplicity of her world and her life. But that changes when a fisherman brings his teenage son who takes an immediate interest in the girl. He shares his music with her, talks about life on land, and - most importantly - asks why she has never been there. As she realizes that there is another whole life out there that she has been denied doubt begins to creep in, doubt and resistance.

As with all of Kim's strongest work, The Bow is strikingly poetic and minimal, built with grace, beauty, and striking imagery. The film is set entirely in the confines of the old man's boat - the limits of the girl's known world - and Kim puts his small water setting to the same use here as he did with the floating temple of Spring, Summer. The camera work is beautifully rhythmic, following the movement of the ocean. The bow of the title is a central, omnipresent, multi faceted image. At different times it is used as a weapon to protect the girl from harm as well as a weapon to control her. It is used to tell fortunes and, strikingly, it is frequently restrung and played as a musical instrument. The central pair function entirely without speech - the only dialogue in the film comes from the fishermen - and Kim again proves himself an absolute master of communication via looks, action, posture and music - with beautiful, haunting harp and piano melodies.

There is one major flaw with the film - one that I can't get into specifically without entering major spoiler territory - but that one mis-step ends up being a minor irritation rather than a major deal breaker. The Bow may not reach the greatness of 3-Iron but for a beautiful, complex, conversation starter you really can't go wrong with any of Kim's recent films. Highly recommended.