Shi gan (Time) poster & wallpaper

Hyeon-a Seong, Ji-Yeon Park, Jung-woo Ha

In an effort to save a failing relationship, a woman undergoes extreme plastic surgery.

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4,456 ratings

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31 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 37 min.

Directed by: Ki-duk Kim

Release Date: July 13, 2007

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Flixster Reviews (334)

  • wanbaclone
    January 16, 2009
    wanbaclone
    Kim Ki-duk isn't interested in telling a straight forward story. He repeats scenes (more than once) though the last time normal space-time is fractured. Time (the movie) is more of a metaphor than anything else. A metaphor for what I have yet to decide.

    At first I was wonde...( read more)ring why the movie wasn't titled Face (since one of the main characters early on decides to have her face changed through plastic surgery); however, it becomes clear that this movie is not interested so much in appearance as it first seems. It is firstly a movie about time.

    When we first meet the couple the movie revolves around, Seh-hee (the girlfriend) is suspicious of her boyfriend's commitment to faithfulness. She wonders if he is growing tired of her because they've been together too long. She ultimately decides to try and take their relationship back to the beginning. She wants it to be new in the hope that the newness will hold the relationship together. What she neglects (however trite it sounds) is the invaluability of time spent together. The characters spend much of the movie apart, and the viewer knows that a sad prophecy of loneliness is unfolding.

    While the movie can function as a cautionary tale, it isn't really that engaging. Seh-hee is obsessive, insecure, selfish (since she's more interested in being loved than loving), and completely jealous. Ji-woo seems to be inattentive, and unresponsive to her concerns. Clearly there's a backstory of dysfunction that we never see. Throughout the movie, Seh-hee spends so much of the time not listening (and not believing) her boyfriend as well as throwing tantrums that I couldn't sympathize with her. When you can't sympathize with the main character of a story in nearly any way, the story has a problem. I'm not saying a character has to likable to be sympathetic, but I am saying that for tragedy to work correctly (and this is clearly a tragedy) there has to be enough in a character that we wish to see redeemed so that when the character is damned, we feel the appropriate emotional response of catharsis. I didn't feel it after watching Time.

    Twice during the movie a character tells Ji-woo that Seh-hee must really love him. Neither character really seems to believe that's true. It's more of a nicety than anything else. We don't believe she loves him either, and that's the problem with this film: she doesn't love him, she just wants to be loved by him. Time can't heal that wound.
  • rebvodka042099
    July 26, 2008
    rebvodka042099
    Yeah, yeah, yeah....I hated this "masterpiece." Go ahead and put me in jail. Although I like Kim Ki-duk films this one just threw me off. I didn't understand a thing. And what I don't understand, I don't like.
  • ceWEBrity
    July 15, 2008
    ceWEBrity
    Beauty and brutality? Queue up another Kim Ki-Duk film! When you consider how naturally the juxtaposition comes with a subject like plastic surgery, it's a surprise that he didn't go after it earlier. Anyway, the man is a master-class visual director and comes up with some truly ...( read more)incredible tales. They fall just out of the realm of human plausibility, acting more as parables, and that's what makes his films so unique.

    There were parts of 3-Iron that irked me because they seemed completely out of the grasp of human reason - I didn't really understand why the characters were acting like they did. That was dumb viewing on my part...of course the characters are going to act unusual. They're inexplicably mute. In all of his films, Ki-Duk hangs reality to make a point or strengthen a theme. Even his comparatively austere Spring Summer Fall Winter and Spring exhibits this. Bold choices like these can damage or enhance a film; the choices that he makes in Time are almost always for the stronger. The constant abuse of plastic surgery by the two main characters is a heartbreaking metaphor for relationships. Even though they have failed, time and again, to make their love work, they keep remodeling themselves in order to give it another try. Never mind the fact that it's the same person behind the new face - it's all they seem to know.

    Whether you choose to view this as a relationship metaphor or a plastic surgery polemic - or both - is totally up to you. One of the strong points of Time is that it makes a very compelling point about a real-life practice without seeming preachy or distracting. Plastic surgery has become huge in Korea, to the point where it has positively effected their economy. Girls as young as 14 are getting eyelid lifts. The film doesn't trouble you with any of this though, instead making a strong insinuation through graphic montages that the practice is commonplace and completely brutal.

    Time has some third-act problems, throwing in too many emotional climaxes and not really knowing where to end. There are at least three points in the last twenty minutes where the movie could have stopped and been just as strong, if not stronger, for it. Ki-Duk's films are generally littered with spots of empty air; this is actually one of his tighter efforts, at least compared to the suffocating Spring. Still, I feel like there were times when the movie just wasn't saying much. All is forgiven, though, when you consider how loud the rest of the film is.
  • Jungian
    April 7, 2008
    Jungian
    An interesting film that asks: How much can we change about who we are?
  • EarthlyAlien
    February 20, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    "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

    ...( read more)obucket.com/albums/w25/EarthlyAlien/?action=view¤t=200x130timeqn0.jpg" target="_blank">Photobucket

    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.
  • hecmed
    June 10, 2009
    hecmed
    Obsesión = a una oportunidad más..
  • RisingSunce
    March 7, 2009
    RisingSunce
    Poetically brutal. Beautifully shaped metaphor of Shi gan add onto Kim Ki Duk's image of a director who knows how to share his ideas with the audience.
  • arashxak
    February 13, 2009
    arashxak
    I know Shi gan deals with insecurity & lack of identity &... but I think the main point is accepting the passage of time & the fact that nothing lasts forever, The best I've seen by Kim Ki-duk along with 3-Iron
  • Weetzie
    February 13, 2009
    Weetzie
    can we really change who we are ?
  • Kavu
    February 11, 2009
    Kavu
    The story is quite strong but the script itself could be better. Ki-duk isn't at his best with this much dialogue but his directing is still pretty solid.

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Critic Reviews

August 3, 2007
Ty Burr, Boston Globe

This is powerful stuff, so why does the movie feel less convincing the longer it goes on? There are two ways to tell this story -- coolly distanced or melodramatically hot -- but [director] Kim combin... full review

July 11, 2007
Nick Schager, Slant Magazine

Woe are the fools who define themselves by physical appearance. full review

View more Shi gan (Time) reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

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