re:mote voices

Title: A Bittersweet Life
Cast: Lee Byeong-Heon, Sin Min-ah, Kim Young-cheol,Kim Roi-ha, Hwang Jeong-min, Eric Moon, Oh Dal-soo, Kim Han, Oh Kwang-rok, Jeong Yoo-mi
Director: Kim Ji-woon

Sunwoo Kim is Mr. Kang's enforcer. So when Mr Baek's men cause trouble, trying to pressurise Mr. Kang to stop using Russian girls and use Mr. Baek's Filipina girls instead, it is Sunwoo that deals with them. The morning after as Sunwoo briefs Mr. Kang, Kang explains that he is going on business to Singapore and has a special job for Sunwoo to do while he is away. Mr. Kang, a rich and shady older man, has been seeing a young musician. Kang suspects that the girl, Hee-soo (Sin Min-ah), is cheating on him - he wants Sunwoo to watch her. If Hee-soo is just friends with this other man, then fine, otherwise Sunwoo is to take care of them both.

Sunwoo spends the three days that Kang is in Singapore watching Hee-soo. Delivering gifts from Kang, driving her about, having lunch with her. All of which is outside his usual work remit, but spending time with a young attractive woman isn't a big deal. Unless she is cheating on Kang? At the same time, Baek claims that Sunwoo's treatment of his men has caused him to lose face. To a degree this is just an excuse to put more pressure on Kang, but Sunwoo starts to recieve threats - apologise or suffer.

A trailer for A Bittersweet Life was shown a week before the film opened. From which one would have expected a straight forward gangster film, two gangs fall out, lots of shooting. However, A Bittersweet Life is more than that, coming more from the new generation of Korean Revenge cinema rather than the more standard Asian gangster flick that one can so readily find in Hong Kong, Japan and Korean cinema. A more extreme and charged kind of film.

The film is in three parts. The build up, the introduction of Sunwoo as a kind of Clint Eastwood character - you need to feel pretty damn lucky if you think you are going to face him down. Sunwoo is taut, fast and deadly. The middle of the film is the turning point, where things are transformed, where what we had been lead to believe was impossible is proven to be quite possible. The middle bit is the bit that is hard to watch, the degradation and destruction. And what is left from there but the aftermath and the question, how did it come to this?

A Bittersweet Life is the latest film to be written and directed by Kim Ji-woon being shown in UK cinemas, the director of A Tale Of Two Sisters and The Quiet Family. From the black comedy of The Quiet Family through the Ringu style A Tale of Two Sisters to A Bittersweet Life. A film that seems to come off the back of the success of fellow Korean director Chan-wook Park, the clearest comparison for something like A Bittersweet Life is Oldboy. Both films imbued with that senselessness and vicious intensity.