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BAD GUY Send This Review to a Friend
Kim Ki-Duk is a hot Korean director with a sublime cinematic imagination, as evidenced previously in his “Spring, Summer, Winter Fall…and Spring.” His “Bad Guy,” made two years before that, also reflects his visual and story creativity, but in this case the story itself is on the obnoxious side in its treatment of the central woman character, and the outcome leaves one with a bitter aftertaste.
Han-gi (Cho Je-Hyun), a pimp involved with lowlife gangsters, is smitten when he sees Sun-hwa ( Seo Won) a middle class student who is waiting for her boyfriend. His advance is repelled and he is beaten by soldier bystanders. Han-gi schemes and, getting her indebted to mobsters, forces Sun-hwa into prostitution.
The pimp has wrecked her life and she is now trapped in a brothel. But after a film full of Sun-hwa’s mistreatment and degradation, writer-director Kim Ki-Duk switches into a lyrical, romantic mode. Implicitly, the film celebrates the blossomed love been Sun-hawa and the man responsible for her misery, including turning tricks in the back of his van. Please.
I’m hardly a slave to political correctness, but the spectacle of romantic love between abuser and abused is upsetting no matter how good the performances—and they are here—or how much cinematographic atmosphere and ingenuity are applied visually and dramatically to the storytelling. A Lifesize Entertainment release.
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