South Korean films have always had a soft spot in my heart. They know how to make films and sometimes they put Hollywood to shame. Like with this film, A Bittersweet Life. This film will make you open up your mind and make you question humanity itself. A Bittersweet Life is a visual work of art which is something rare in gangster films. This film turned violence into a thing of beauty, that’s something rarely seen. The tale to the film walks a complicated and tasteful tightrope connecting philosophy and aggression, expression and carelessness.
Sun-Woo played by the multi-talented Byung-hun Lee (J.S.A, The Good the Bad and the Weird) is the anti-hero of the story. He is lonely, serious, calm, sophisticated, and an unpopular enforcer who has served his boss Kang, a brutal gangster, for seven years without a single complaint when he does Kang’s dirty work. Sun-Woo is seen as the most trusted of Kang’s men. Kang has a job for his most trusted man because he knows Sun-Woo has never been in love or even had a lover. Kang’s precise orders are to watch over his girlfriend while he’s away and to execute her if Sun-Woo discovers she is having an affair, the coming drama is quite obvious. She indeed is having an affair and Sun-Woo makes a critical decision not to kill her which relied on his personal judgment in disagreement with his boss’s. When Kang finds out he feels like a father betrayed for the first time. Kang pursues the procedure of the underworld and makes a decision on punishing Sun-Woo who has been like a son to him. Before Kang goes through with the punishment, he asks Sun-Woo why he betrayed him, in which Sun-Woo responds “I thought if she promised never to cheat on you, everything would go back to normal, everything will be okay.” Kang pauses and asks if he had fallen for her. Sun-Woo goes quiet almost perplexed. As the punishment is about to happen he realizes that throughout his whole life of never finding love he falls for his boss’s girlfriend. He feels like his boss is insulting him. When the boss leaves, Sun-Woo breaks away from custom by declining his punishment and escapes by fighting lots of his boss’s men. Now the film turns into a quest of vengeance against his boss’s men and his boss. In this bittersweet world full of sorrow and calamity there is space for comedic moments, particularly the scenes where Sun-Woo tries to buy guns from some unskilled gangsters. I won’t get more into the story for I might give it away.
The action scenes were beautifully choreographed, in particular the escape fight scene and the climatic finale fight scene. Numerous of the scenes portraying brutality and fights are well positioned into the film to illustrate delicate emotional transformations of Sun-Woo and the unanticipated circumstances he stumbles upon. Nevertheless, director Kim Ji-woon explains them extremely precise as beautiful photographs at times can be very romantic, which is far from those gruesome gunfights we learn to expect from gangster films. Particularly the use of the lighting makes it very sensitive and creative. Ji-woon indeed has an astonishing artistic intellect; his direction is a spectacle to behold. He made the ending open to the viewer for their own personal interpretation which is quite enjoyable.
A Bittersweet Life has been compared to Scorsese and Tarantino and it should, but it maintains itself firm in its own credibility. 9.1 out of 10
No comments:
Post a Comment