After the success of A Tale of Two Sisters, a complex psychological film with horror elements, Kim Jee-woon returns to the scene with his latest film A Bittersweet Life. Touted as an action noir film, the film is ultimately a visually lavish way to tell a deceptively simple story.
Sun-woo is calm, cool and collected. As a bodyguard in some sort of gang, he's the right hand man of Kang, the Boss. Sun-woo seems detached from the rest of the world; he's like a passenger riding along with life as the scenery. He lives a carefully ordered life, a straight line that has no diversions. The Boss likes this for obvious reasons, and one day he orders him to watch over his girlfriend. If Sun-woo finds her cheating, he must either kill her or inform him. This sets a chain of events that leads to the destruction of Sun-woo's perfectly ordered life.
The premise of the story is pretty simple, and is typical of the noir genre. The great characterization of Sun-woo shines trhough; this is truly a movie about him. When the first cracks in his life manifest, he reacts with a fury that he has hidden for perhaps all his life. He spends the next hour or so unleashing this pent up emotion in various stylish and creative scenes. This may be the film's greatest strength as it is it's weakness - it may be very well done, but the film is too typical, and when you watch it you get the feeling that it has already been done before.
The ultimate irony in the film is that Sun-woo himself doesn't know exactly why he undertook this path of bloodshed; he just committed to it, and that was that. Of course, we all know why he did the things that he did (or do we?) but Sun-woo, we theorize, has never experienced these feelings before. His conflict spans the film as well. At the end he has finally realized what it was all about, and accepts whatever comes to him.
Apart from everything else, the film is visually one of the best of the year. Big props (is there a pun in here somewhere?) to Ryu Seong-hee, who designed the sets for this film. If the visual style looks similar, she also worked on Oldboy. Kudos also goes out to the editing of certain scenes in the movie. At one point when Sun-woo looks after the Boss' girl, we see a flash of a scene of swaying trees (were those bamboo trees?) seen earlier in the movie, a kind of leitmotif similar to the cloud formations in Akira Kurosawa's Ran.
Some call this movie "The next Oldboy" or an Oldboy clone. I think that doesn't hold much ground aside from the stylistic violence or the basic plot thread. Oldboy was about revenge; A Bittersweet Life has revenge secondary to the main point of the film: "The sweet will never be sweeter without the sour."
Or something like that.
Sun-woo is calm, cool and collected. As a bodyguard in some sort of gang, he's the right hand man of Kang, the Boss. Sun-woo seems detached from the rest of the world; he's like a passenger riding along with life as the scenery. He lives a carefully ordered life, a straight line that has no diversions. The Boss likes this for obvious reasons, and one day he orders him to watch over his girlfriend. If Sun-woo finds her cheating, he must either kill her or inform him. This sets a chain of events that leads to the destruction of Sun-woo's perfectly ordered life.
The premise of the story is pretty simple, and is typical of the noir genre. The great characterization of Sun-woo shines trhough; this is truly a movie about him. When the first cracks in his life manifest, he reacts with a fury that he has hidden for perhaps all his life. He spends the next hour or so unleashing this pent up emotion in various stylish and creative scenes. This may be the film's greatest strength as it is it's weakness - it may be very well done, but the film is too typical, and when you watch it you get the feeling that it has already been done before.
The ultimate irony in the film is that Sun-woo himself doesn't know exactly why he undertook this path of bloodshed; he just committed to it, and that was that. Of course, we all know why he did the things that he did (or do we?) but Sun-woo, we theorize, has never experienced these feelings before. His conflict spans the film as well. At the end he has finally realized what it was all about, and accepts whatever comes to him.
Apart from everything else, the film is visually one of the best of the year. Big props (is there a pun in here somewhere?) to Ryu Seong-hee, who designed the sets for this film. If the visual style looks similar, she also worked on Oldboy. Kudos also goes out to the editing of certain scenes in the movie. At one point when Sun-woo looks after the Boss' girl, we see a flash of a scene of swaying trees (were those bamboo trees?) seen earlier in the movie, a kind of leitmotif similar to the cloud formations in Akira Kurosawa's Ran.
Some call this movie "The next Oldboy" or an Oldboy clone. I think that doesn't hold much ground aside from the stylistic violence or the basic plot thread. Oldboy was about revenge; A Bittersweet Life has revenge secondary to the main point of the film: "The sweet will never be sweeter without the sour."
Or something like that.
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