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.”

address unknown (w&d kim ki duk)

At one point in the film, Eunok the one-eyed beauty, takes an LSD pill which her GI suitor has hidden in her bag. She starts to trip, staggering forwards, the world turned wavy. Duk doesn’t develop the trip, the effects are over before they’ve begun and in a later scene, when the GI forces her to take another pill, the action cuts before we get to see what effect it has on her. You can see why, having introduced the trope of the trip, Duk then backs off from it. Because the reality is that the whole film is a trip, one that becomes increasingly and dangerously delirious. 

Address Unknown is set on the edge of a US military base (Camp Eagle) in South Korea. Planes roar overhead and soldiers in full camo gear practice their excercises in the fields whilst the locals go about their business. The presence of the Americans distorts reality and facilitates a latent violence which becomes more and more overt as the film progresses. One of the key characters is Chang-guk, a mixed race, Korean-Black American. His mother still writes letters to the GI who has long since disappeared from their lives, whilst Chang-guk suffers from racial discrimination. They are just two characters whose interaction with the US forces has lead to tragedy. Eunok and her admirer, Jihum, will be two more, as the rogue GI turns on Eunok. Stamping on the ground, Jihum realises it’s hollow. He stamps again, and falls through into a makeshift hidden graveyard, a hidden relic of the Korean war his father fought in. The skeletons are very near the surface, wanting to get out.

The violence is embodied by Jae-hyeon Jo, the dog catcher, who brutally kills dogs before selling them to a local restaurant by the kilo. This violence finally overflows, consuming everyone in an increasingly gothic denouement. At times the film, with its vivid editing and extended cast reminded me of early Kustirica, his near contemporary. A portrait of a society which is out there, subject to the forces of a foreign military, on the edge of madness. Like Kustirica’s early films, there’s also something affectionate about this portrayal of everyday people trying to get along in a world that doesn’t seem to want to give them a chance.