re:mote voices

Title: Bad Guy [Nabbeun Namja]
Cast: Jae-hyeon Jo, Won Seo, Yun-tae Kim, Duek-mun Choi, Yoon-young Choi, Yoo-jin Shin, Jung-young Kim
Director: Ki-duk Kim

A young gangster approaches an attractive young woman. He crosses the line; she tries to drive him away. The police get involved. She spits in his face. He plots her downfall. The bad guy finds out about the girl, has people check her out, then sets her up. A wallet comes into her hands. She is caught with it, and a hole is dug that she can't get out of. Before she knows it, she has sold herself into a whorehouse to sell off her debt. Dazed and confused by events she really doesn't know what just happened, really doesn't want to be there, but there is a clear threat to prevent her from leaving. The whorehouse is run by the bad guy, who sits behind a one-way mirror and watches while men degrade her.

As the film progresses the characters struggle and resist, but gradually form a strange relationship. Punctuated by violence and damage, and yet the pair eventually cling to each other. Bad Guy showed as part of the first Tartan Asia Extreme cinema festival, though at the time I managed to miss it. Now, later, catching it on DVD, I have the extra option of reading the film expert's notes that come with the film. In those notes, the expert suggests that feminists will hate Bad Guy, because of the way girl comes to love being a whore, how she relishes it. Watching the film, that comes across as being a somewhat delusional thing to say, more stereotypical male fantasy than credible thinking.

At the time I watched Bad Guy I had been reading Tricia Sullivan's Someone To Watch Over Me, in which there is a scene where characters are watching King Kong, and there is a suggestion of it being a rape fantasy, a process of shamanic empowerment - where the girl is only brought alive by the primal male force. From that point of view the idea of the girl's transformation by the practically mute bad guy seems more credible. Though in the end, it seems simplest and most straightforward to say that the girl is traumatised, torn down, and damaged, to the point where she clings to her captor, in the same way as any hostage would to a kidnapper.

The role of the silent lead is a common one in the films by Korean director Kim Ki-Duk's film, to the point after having seen a couple you start to measure the film. How long will it be before someone talks? Will the leads talk at all, while those around them babble on? To a degree that does raise his bad guy to a mythic, primal level, and to a degree similar can be said of the girl. It is over half way through the film before the bad guy says a single word.

Like Kim Ki-Duk's other films, Bad Guy is uneasy. Dropped in the Asia Extreme category there is something extreme about this film, and much of his other work - but its an unsettling extreme, something that puts you on edge. There are certainly scenes that are extreme - the man killed by a sheet of paper in Bad Guy counts for one - but he doesn't tend to go for the crawling dead or gore. With the relationship between the bad guy and the girl made whore, Bad Guy probably is his most ambiguous work - what is he trying to say? How are we supposed to react?