time (w&d kim ki duk)

Another offering from the late South Korean director, one with the fascinating premise of people recreating themselves through plastic surgery. If the face changes, is the soul still the same? A woman, See-Hee, believing her lover, Ji-woo, to be bored of her, decides to recreate herself, taking on a new appearance, then returning to haunt him. He falls in love with this new woman, who then finds herself questioning him: has he ditched her former self? In loving her new identity, is he betraying his love for the woman she used to be? There’s a lot of twists and turns to be negotiated, far too many in fact. Time ends up feeling like an obscure Marivaux play or a Shakespeare identity drama which got left on the shelf. For all the fascinating material, the script starts to run away from the characters, who desperately try to catch up. The scenes become more and more absurd, and the film is a soufflé which, for all its great ideas, eventually falls flat. Duk’s themes and concerns are evident, and have echoes of Address Unknown, (when Eunok places a cut-out of an eye from a magazine over her blind eye), but he can’t sustain the conceit. All the same, the early instance of technology in the film (Ji-woo is editing with final cut) suggests that perhaps there is a connection to a film like Face Off. Themes of appearance and identity which the internet increasingly puts in doubt, beginning to surface at the turn of the last century, when the soul you believed you were communicating with on-line is nothing like the soul you meet in the flesh. As Shakespeare also noted: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”