Bittersweet Life (ScreenDaily Review)

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Bittersweet Life (Dal Kom Han In-Saeng)


Lee Marshall in Cannes 07 June 2005

Dir/scr: Kim Jee-woon South Korea. 2005. 115mins.

An ultra-violent action noir by Korean director Kim Jee-woon, A Bittersweet Life is a stylish story of a faithful underworld lieutentant who crosses his boss and ends up fighting for his life against his own gang. As in his previous genre outing, the dark psycho-horror yarn A Tale Of Two Sisters, Kim shows that he is a master of atmosphere. But he also has the talent to take a genre and unpick it along one of its seams in order to give it greater depth.

Action fans will be kept happy by some sharply shot and edited fight sequences, but as in Chan Wook-park’s Old Boy, the hero’s jabs, flying kicks and weapon thrusts are served in existential sauce.

A Bittersweet Life netted a respectable $6.5m in its first five weeks on home turf – a little less than fellow Cannes contender Crying Fist. However, its overseas prospects may be rosier: the film has already sold to Japan for a record $3.2m, and should also play well in Western territories with appetite for arthouse Korean genre fare like Old Boy and Memories Of Murder.

Kim has created a vision of the dark Seoul of the night and a cast of characters that stand out with the hyper-real clarity of comic book. The hero, Sunwoo (Lee Byung-hun), is a cool mafia henchman who works for local boss Kang (Kim Young-chul), ostensibly as a hotel manager. Sunwoo is handsome, perfectly groomed, coiffed like a rock star, impeccable in dark suit and white shirt; but he is so impassive and emotionally inscrutable that his only two expressions at the beginning of the film are with tie or without.

Kang treats Sunwoo almost a son, and when he goes off to Shanghai on business, he asks him to keep an eye on his beautiful young mistress, Heesoo (Shin Mina), who he suspects is having an affair with a younger man. Under instructions to kill them both if he finds the lovers together, Sunwoo is unable to carry out his master’s orders when the inevitable discovery is made, as he has become infatuated with Heesoo – no typical gangster’s moll, but a sensitive and rather innocent classical cellist. The love interest is the weakest element of the plot – there is little chemistry between Sunwoo and Heesoo, and we have to take his infatuation as read.

It is Sunwoo’s moment of humanity, ironically, that unleashes the crescendo of ultra-violence which unrolls between this mid-point and the film’s spectacular final shoot out in the designer bar of his Dolce Vita hotel. First targeted by Baek, a ruthless, scarred gangland boss who Sunwoo insulted, he is then targeted by his own gang – led by Moon Suk, a rival lieutenant who looks like the manager of a 1970s rock band, and who has always had a grudge against the pretty boy killer.

Photography and production design work hand in hand to crank up the atmosphere; we pass from the designer magazine world and elegant nightscapes of the opening scenes, through Heesoo’s deliciously frou-frou mistress flat, to the raw post-industrial wasteland of abatoirs and abandoned factories where Sunwoo is strung up, bled like a pig and buried alive.

There’s a curious, camped up interlude in what looks like a Central Asian dodgy goods emporium, a sort of gangsters’ Ebay, where Sunwoo goes to get himself a shooter in order to prepare himself for the final escalation of ultra-violence. Guns are unusual in Korean culture, and the acquisition of what in a US action flick would be the no-brainer weapon of choice is loaded with meaning.

In the end, this is what saves A Bittersweet Life from the facile arcade-game morality of a shoot ‘em up exploitation flick: the blood feels, and looks, real, and Sunwoo becomes progressively weighed down by guilt and a kind of existential sadness as the bodies pile up around him.

Kim has now done surreal black comedy (The Quiet Family), character-led comedy (The Foul King), psycho-horror with supernatural topping (A Tale Of Two Sisters) and existential action noir. His next one can only be a sci-fi western.

Production company
Bom Film

International sales
CJ Entertainment

Producers
Oh Jung-wan
Eugene Lee

Cinematography
Kim Ji-yong

Production design
Ryu Seong-hee

Editor
Choi Jae-geun

Music
Dalpalan
Jang Young-kyu

Main cast
Lee Byung-hun
Kim Young-chul
Shin Mina
Whang Jung-min
Kim Roi-ha

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