AKA: Beautiful.
Director: Jae-hong Jeon.
Language: Korean.
Release year: 2008.
Rating: * *1/2
This is yet another flick to come out of Kim Ki-Duk’s inexplicably beautiful factory. However, this one was only written and co-produced by him, and someone else took the directing mantle, and did a pretty ordinary job.
Eun-young (Su-yeon Cha) is drop-dead gorgeous. Her beauty makes her the center of attraction everywhere she goes. She’s always on other people’s radar whenever she passes by them. Men, like typical, drooling dingbats, approach her with all sorts of favors, masked innuendos and praises. Amateurs think she’s an actress, or at least has what it takes to be one. Glamour-crazed teenagers want her autograph, her best friend’s loser boyfriend wants to get intimate with her, and strangers send her flowers in multitude at her apartment. She has experienced this nonsense one too many times, and knows how to deal with it: Just by ignoring it. There’s never a place she visits where she doesn’t make heads turn. People fantasize about her the moment they lay their eyes on her. But Eun-young cruises through this muck every day, undeterred and unfazed.
One of the obsessive admirers tricks Eun-young into letting him inside her apartment. While trying to force his emotions on her, he flips and in the process of convincing her of his love for her, he rapes her. Ruing his actions, he surrenders himself to the police. However, he tries to condone his action by saying that she, too, is equally responsible for the abuse he has inflicted on her. Her beauty, and her every twitch drove him to his agonizing limits, and made him do the unthinkable. He goes so far as to say that she raped him and not the other way around. That’s expected from a borderline degenerate like him, and you can find such characters only in a Kim Ki-Duk’s world. Even the detective who handles the case doesn’t hold himself back in saying that Eun-young, too, is to be blamed for what happened to her. He attributes the incident to her skimpy outfit, and blatant flaunting of her curves and uncovered body parts. In fact, the cop is also seen empathizing with the rapist after watching one of the tapes that the rapist made of Eun-young while stalking her. He says that with a body like that, he understands why the rapist went overboard, and he doubts if there’s anyone who wouldn’t want to “score” a woman like Eun-young.
Eun-chul (Cheon-hee Lee), junior to the abovementioned detective in charge, can’t help feeling sorry for the lady. He bends backwards to help her every time he gets an opportunity to. The good samaritan role he plays out isn’t totally guileless or selfless. It’s Eun-young’s beauty that has brought out the philanthropist in Eun-chul. He follows her around, keeping in close stride, always on the lookout for a moment where she’d need some help, and he’ll jump in like some savior to be the altruist cop. The fact is, he’s no different than any other pest infatuated with the lady. In the privacy of his home, he uses the same tape made by the rapist, zooms in on Eun-young’s lips and jerks off; just like your average Joe.
Bruised, both physically and more so psychologically, Eun-young starts to look at her beauty as a curse, a rotten layer she wants to rip off her body. She decides to engorge herself, and resort to binging on all sorts of junk food. Her act of immoderate glut draws lots of flak and ridicule from the people around her, and that only adds fuel to fire. However, this attempt at surfeit backfires, and she, more than once, passes out on her regurgitated slime. Even the doctor overlooking her care doesn’t miss the opportunity to fondle with her at the behest of examining her. Failing at becoming an overblown pig, Eun-young decides to adopt the diametrically opposite method of becoming ugly. She decides to starve herself to the bones, surviving only on water, wide range of diet pills and sprinting around the city all day long. It’s not too long before she fails miserably in this endeavor, too. Her frail body caves in to such rigorous and continuous assault on its wellbeing. She draws the final straw by trying to whore herself, but her decrepit and the monstrosity of a visage, the product of tawdry makeup, doesn’t do her any good here either.
All of Eun-young’s ploys succeed in making her look repulsive. However, the lines she crossed while trying to stoop so low in the appearance department, coupled with the raw trauma of sexual abuse, has resulted in an irrevocable scarring of her perception of reality. She starts to hallucinate, and sees the face of her rapist in every passerby. She tries desperately to claw her way back into normalcy, but she’s way past the Rubicon, and the only way out is to dig herself deeper into the abysm she’s been living in ever since the incident. After the initial protest at Eun-chul’s selfish, albeit and eventually, genuine desire to help her, Eun-young finally starts to embrace his stalking company, and requests him to set her free from the images that gnaw at her. The resolution is reached in a typical Kim Ki-Duk fashion, almost.
While watching the movie, and those aware of Kim Ki-Duk’s choice of concepts, one will see his signature shades all over this movie. But what they’ll sorely miss is his master stroke of brilliance at the execution. The director didn’t live up to the expectations that a Kim Ki-Duk’s story generates. The director went over the top in some places with his portrayal of such a bleak and disturbing subject. He did manage to get decent performances from his actors, but the screenplay just didn’t do enough justice to Kim Ki-Duk’s vision. Even the choice of background score, even when it wasn’t needed, added to his dismal excursion as a director. The same movie in the hands of Kim Ki-Duk, would’ve been yet another winner and an unforgettable experience, but alas, that was not to be.
Since it’s penned by Kim Ki-Duk, the story needs to have some upsetting and sometimes, sickening, scenes that refuse to leave your head. One such scene was when Eun-young collapses on a sidewalk, and every Tom, Dick and Harry, of all age and sizes, rushes to her help with rabid intentions. One of them, a doctor, even tries to touch her private parts under the ruse of making sure she’s alright. This pack of driveling “good citizens” even get into a fight to decide as to who will have the privilege to drop the lady to a hospital. Another blood-curdling scene comes at the end of the movie, where a doctor is seen taking advantage of a cadaver. There are more such revolting scenes, but it’s just another day in the park for a Kim Ki-Duk flick.
Apart from the uncompromisingly raw nature of the story, the leading lady was something worth spending your 80-odd minutes over this movie. From being repugnantly bulimic to being pitifully anorexic, Su-yeon aced the complexities of her character. The fact that she’s breathtakingly adorable adds to the wide range of reaction a viewer would conjure up while watching her deconstruct herself through disgustingly humane means. Other actors were just a mere addition, and had nothing more to do except being true to their characters: By being men.
If your guts don’t churn that easily and if the above review didn’t deter you from reading it all the way through, then I suggest you give this movie a chance. It’s no Kim Ki-Duk unconventional gem, but anything that has “Kim Ki-Duk” attached to it is definitely worth a try.
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