Yang Ik-June’s Breathless is a sober, serious work of art
Starring Yang Ik-June. In Korean with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday to Monday, January 28 to 31, and Wednesday and Thursday, February 2 and 3, at the Vancity Theatre
In one interview after another, Quentin Tarantino repeats the following filmmaking mantra: real violence is horrible, but cinematic violence is cool.
In Yang Ik-June’s prizewinning first feature (called Breathless in English, but with no discernible connection to Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece), this fine distinction is blurred to the point where it disappears altogether.
Kim Sang-Hoon (played by the writer-director himself) is a strong-arm man who will hit just about anybody for any reason. Even when he appears to be acting in a somewhat gallant fashion (punching out a boyfriend for brutalizing his girlfriend), he then undoes this impression by slapping the victim and asking why she puts up with such abuse.
Why, indeed?
Even though the amount of hitting in this movie would shame a Punch and Judy show, that is the question that the director never stops asking. In particular, his male protagonists tend to treat the women in their lives like ambulatory punching bags, while the women don’t seem to find anything unusual in this behaviour. The South Korea we see in Breathless is very much a thug-punch-thug world.
Watch the trailer for Breathless.
But wait. There is a reason for all this insanity. Just as we gradually become aware that Tony Soprano is the end result of nurture, not nature, eventually we come to understand that the brutal Kim wasn’t born with calluses on his fists. When he lashes out, his real target is always painful memories.
Because everything is so unglamorous, there’s no way we can pretend that we’re watching an Asian spin on Pulp Fiction. The violence that we see feels real, and we wince with every punch.
Breathless isn’t an easy film to watch, but it is a sober, serious work of art. The fact that it’s also entertaining only makes it more disturbing.
Comments
2 Comments
Jenny
Jan 26, 2011 at 3:05pm
It's a good movie -- too bad this writeup (or maybe all English-language writeups?) didn't say much about it. From what I understand the violence is a commentary on South Korean history, steeped in violence and the constant threat of war (with Japan, N.Korea etc.). I've never been to S.Korea so am not judging, but the filmmaker (who is also the lead actor here) grew up in an extremely abusive household and made this movie -- I believe, even *selling his house* to fund it -- simply because he needed to get this history of abuse out of his system. Its phenomenal success in S.Korea proves how many people this movie touched and how many recognize themselves in the "shitfly" (Dongpari, original movie title) hero here.
I don't think it's worth mentioning Tarantino so many times here, this movie has nothing to do with that dude.
City Observer
Jan 28, 2011 at 11:52am
Breathless was easily one of the best movies at the 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival. A surprisingly comic, and just about the most foul-mouthed movie you're likely to see this year, with its jazz-inflected trance score, this low rent Korean gangster flick, even given the gloss and stylized sheen brought to the proceedings by first-time director / South Korean screen star Yang Ik-june, Breathless still manages to explore the same sort of anomie that is to be found in the best VIFF flicks, with it's combination of melancholy and despair, tempered by just the slightest hint of hope. A must-see if you didn't catch it at VIFF 2009.