Beautiful

Areomdabda (South Korea)
A Kim Ki-duk Film, Sponge Entertainment production, in association with Blue Smile. (International sales: Sponge, Seoul.) Produced by Song Myeong-cheol. Executive producers, Kim Ki-duk, Cho Sung-gyu. Directed by Juhn Jai-hong. Screenplay, Juhn; story, Kim Ki-duk.

With: Cha Su-yeon, Lee Chun-heui, Choi Myeong-su, Kim Min-su, Lee Min, Kim Beom-jun.

Typical yarn of an obsessive love that destroys the very object of that love and shot through with a critique of South Korea’s fascination with physical perfection.

Exec produced and from an original story by Kim Ki-duk, “Beautiful” looks every bit like the work of the South Korean maverick, even if helming and screenplay credits go to Juhn Jai-hong, his former assistant director. Typical yarn of an obsessive love that destroys the very object of that love — and shot through with a critique of South Korea’s fascination with physical perfection — film plays like the flipside of Kim’s cosmetic-surgery drama, “Time,” with the heroine this time trying to make herself unattractive to male eyes. Fest career looks warm and niche business in Kim-friendly territories likewise.

With people always asking her if she’s an actress, Kim Eun-yeong (Cha Su-yeon) feels burdened by her natural beauty. Even her best friend, catty Mi-yeon (Lee Min), who’s about to get her second nose job, expresses surprise that Eun-yeong is still single. And Mi-yeon’s b.f., Min-ho (Kim Beom-jun), starts pestering her with flowers and phone calls, asking for a date.

However, Eun-yeong has another, much more secret admirer, Eun-cheol (Lee Chun-heui), who one day breaks into her apartment and rapes her. Claiming he still loves her, he leaves behind his I.D. and phone number, and turns himself into the cops. In an ironic twist at the police station, the traumatized Eun-yeong finds herself practically cast as the guilty party by a lowlife detective (Choi Myeong-su), who practically accuses her of leading Eun-cheol on with her beauty.

At the end of her tether, and inspired by a overweight girl in a park, Eun-yeong tries to rid herself of her “handicap,” first gorging on fatty foods and, after she ends up in hospital (where even a dosctor comes on to her), exercising and starving herself till she passes out. Still desperate to rid herself of the “beautiful” tag, Eunyeong’s behavior turns even more eccentric — all the time watched by a neighborhood cop (Kim Min-su) who has started to fall for her, big time.

Pic is marbled throughout with typical Kim Kim-duk trademarks, all reflecting his interest in the obsessive Korean soul: Eun-yeong looking at herself naked in a mirror, every character in some way possessed by behavioral extremes, and physical beauty seen as a commodity that can be bought, borrowed or sold. Ending, which finally transgresses all social norms, carries a wickedly peverse coda.

Juhn’s direction is perhaps a tad slicker than Kim’s norm, and he has some straightforward fun in the middle going with Eun-yeong’s eating and dieting binges. But there’s the same observational coolness to the pic that informs all of Kim’s work, evoking little sympathy for the central character as the script charts her descent into madness.

The biggest irony of the movie is that Eun-yeong is not actually especially beautiful by contempo South Korean standards, merely pretty. Cha, who debuted in last year’s ghostly romance, “For Eternal Hearts,” as a weird teen, is again well cast as the spacey lead, and other thesps hit the mark within the limitations of their schematic roles.

Technical credits are smooth at all levels.
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Beautiful

Dir: Juhn Jaihong Korea, 2007. 88mins
Beautiful, whose original title in Korean is the mellifluous 'Arumbdabda', is often confused and sometimes, especially near the end, even downright silly, but it's never wholly without interest. Its first-time 30-year-old director, Juhn Jaihong, is a protege of Kim Ki-duk, the prodigiously productive and internationally-known Korean director. In fact, Kim Ki-duk is variously listed in press materials as being the screenwriter of the film or as merely being responsible for the 'idea' behind it.

This tale of a gorgeous woman who is victimized by her own beauty is the kind of high-concept, exotic, and easy-to-digest 'art' film that should do well on the festival scene, and even in DVD and ancillary markets, but whose theatrical possibilities are less robust.

The startlingly beautiful Eunyoung (Cha) can't keep men from instinctively flocking around her. Even her best friend's boyfriend is so smitten that, after becoming completely obsessed, he rapes her so as to 'make his mark' on her, a chilling notion. A policeman assigned to her case also falls for her, to the point of basically quitting his job so that he can follow her around like a puppy-dog, 'protecting' her.

For a while, Eunyoung tries unsuccessfully to eliminate her beauty by eating everything in sight, followed by a regime of bulimia and anorexia. (This film may hold the cinematic record for number of vomiting scenes.) Next she tries the slutty bar girl look, which gets her into even more trouble. Toward the close of the film what has heretofore been treated (probably inadvertently) for laughs ends tragically in a hail of bullets.

Eunyoung's beauty is the hinge around which everything else in the film turns. Even in the middle of the credits we see her face suddenly pop up in close-up for no other reason than to make viewers 'ooh and aah' over her, like all the male characters in the film. In fact, close-ups predominate throughout the film as though to suggest that facial beauty is in fact the most important thing about a person.

Thematically speaking, the film purports to be the illustration of an ancient saying a fat girl tells Eunyoung, to the effect that 'beauty is destiny'. It's also almost a textbook illustration of the influential film theory, derived from feminism, that all cinema is set up for the delectation of the male spectator, or, as the jargon has it, for the male gaze.

Yet there's a way that the material is presented that might raise legitimate suspicions. The film carefully offers us someone to dislike, a slovenly, overtly sexist police officer who tells Eunyoung that she was also at least partly responsible for her rape by being so beautiful and dressing provocatively. The effect of this clearly dislikable character however, is to present the other obsessed male characters (the rapist, the nice policeman) as somehow innocent, even noble, because their desire for her is so overwhelming that it simply can't be controlled.

The rapist at one point shouts at her: 'Your beauty raped me!' Needless to say, this theory is quite a distance from the gentle, desire-denying Buddhism that Kim Ki-duk offered up in his best-known film, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring.

This story of beautiful women and lovelorn cops bears more than a passing resemblance to Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express, but falls far short of its subtle nuance.

Production
Kim Ki-duk Film


International Sales
Sponge Entertainment (Seoul)
+82 2 6404 5132


Producer
Song Myung-chul


Screenplay
Juhn Jaihong,
Kim Ki-duk

Cinematography
Kim Gi-tae

Music
Roh Hyung-Woo

Cast
Cha Soo-yeon
Lee Chun-hee,
Choi Myung-soo

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