Girl Interrupted

Just as all Asian foods are not the same---Korean food, for example, tends to be
spicy, emphasizes beef, and lots of appetizers in the form of cold kimchee, cold
bean sprouts, cold mini-fishes, so Asian cinema is also not all the same.

If you were to ask someone from Hong Kong what a typical Korean is like, they'd probably envision a more violent Asian. You don't want to mess with a Korean. This isn't the image I have of Korean grad students I've known. Males, in particular, are extremely quiet, as if the initiative to talk has been beaten out of them.

Hong Kong cinema is all flash and style. The violence is stylized. Nothing typifies this more than Chow Yun Fat, falling side ways, two guns in hand, blasting furiously, while champing on a cigarette, completely unmoving as he hits the ground, while doves fly around in slo-mo. This imagery is vintage Woo, and typical Hong Kong.

Even Wong Kar-wai, who deals with adult relationships, rather than young boys with guns, depicts violence in impressionistic blurs, with killers having existential crisis, with women mysteriously cleaning up their houses.

Last night, I caught a showing of Kim Ki-duk's Samaritan Girl. If anything, this film reminds me of Takeshi Kitano. Kitano is known for his ganster flicks such as Hana-bi, where vast amounts of time are spent in serenity. Images of a man painting, taking quiet walks with his dying wife, punctuated by violence, such as chopsticks to the eye. And yet, where Kitano has two disparate emotions in the same person as a personality quirk, Kim Ki-duk does it more naturally.

I've said before that Korean cinema is gritty. The violence, more palpable, more real. In Hong Kong cinema, you say "That is so cool" when you see guns ablazing and people dying. In Korean cinema, you say "I wouldn't want to get in an alley with that guy".

I was also reminded of Scorsese's take on what has been phrased as the Madonna/Whore complex, which, as I understand it, are the two fantasies men have about women. That they are saints (of sorts) meant to save them from sin, and that they are there to have glorious sex. This is clearly the dichotomy presented here, in what amounts to Kim Ki-duk's Taxi Driver (were I to have seen that film).

Kim Ki-duk's talents lie in his ability to convey information without dialogue. At an extreme is 3-iron, which is something of a revelation. Of the two main characters, a wandering vagabond Buddhist and an abused wide, only three words are spoken between them the entire film. Their communication is completely wordless, and yet you know what exactly what Kim is trying to tell us in his story.

The storyline is a bit fantastical. Jae-Young is a teen prostitute, whose trying to raise money for a trip to Europe. She's all smiles, who cares about the men she meets. She recounts the story of an Indian prostitute, Vasumitra, who slept with men who reformed their lives after having sex with her. This is perhaps the most blatant underlining in the film, and yet, unlike say, the Pied Piper from The Sweet Hereafter, the story is unfamiliar, and therefore not so grating. And really, it becomes the story of Yeo-Jin, her best friend (possibly more), who is her business partner, and becomes the story of her dad, the cop, who wants to protect her daughter, but realizes that he can only do so much (although what he does...).

Kim Ki-duk has been protrayed as a misogynist, and yet, his comment is really about all human behavior, that within us lie the ability for great good and great sin, and sin more operative than evil, for even within sin, there is the desire to be good. Violence and sex are both redemptive qualities, and yet seen as hideous qualities too. That the main story is so focused on something that seems right out of Breaking the Waves should not hide from the fact that Kim is trying to show that everything isn't black or white.

Everything is black and white.