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Kim Ki-Duk, 2006
Kim Ki-Duk may very well be Asian art cinema’s biggest and most annoying riddle.
He was the focus of a complete retrospective at MIFF ‘02, due largely to the success of his 2000 breakout The Isle. A stylistic anomaly amongst his earlier works, The Isle’s dynamic juxtaposition of atmospheric stillness and physical brutality was not a fair sample of the then-accumulated murky Kim Ki-Duk waters, a pooled assemblage of muddled efforts including a mundane film about the effect of American warfare in Asia – replete with the most absurd animal butchery – in 2001’s Address Unknown, and a mind-bogglingly awful “real-time” conceptual misfire (Real Fiction, 2000). Since then he has developed both an identifiable style – something previously absent – and a devoted fan base, champions of his austere styles and his violent wiles.
And so, with MIFF having supported him thus far, it seems it will always be a comfortable and welcoming haven for this sometimes dynamic chronicler of our dark places, and sometimes “angry” poseur; indeed this year, along with 2006’s Time, we have two new Kim Ki-Duk films to ponder.
Taking some idea of prison/s as its core concern, Breath involves the somewhat radical juxtaposition of a surprisingly standard (but nonetheless relevant) “suffocating” and crumbling marriage (between a bored sculptress and her boring cardboard-cutout career husband) with the more complex and less defined universe of relationships between four cell-sharing prisoners, one of whom is a self-destructive and prominent regular in the nightly news; his tale of pseudo-cathartic self-harm affecting our bored sculptress such to literally move her. Like, all the way to the prison, where Ki-Duk himself literally presides over the ensuing relationship between our captives and its escalating emotional and sexual dialogue.
Leaving each self-contained world to reasonably obliquely mirror the other, it is within the two separate universes that the metaphorical cages are fleshed out, leaving us with so much bizarre escape when the unlikely sculptress/self-mutilator romance takes root. Breath is, in many ways, the perfect post-Isle Ki-Duk specimen. All of his stylistic/storytelling techniques are on display – super-dynamic tonal shifts, characters engaging in near-silent conversations, archly symbolic moments of lonely clarity, etc – and so are his primary conceptual concerns of space/confinement, perhaps even most literally so here. It is this obsessive revisiting of both style and theme that is his most persistently interesting and frustrating aspect: he is interested in these themes, what they mean, how they can be best explored dramatically, and yet once there (and even occasionally successfully) is almost always waylaid by an ever-present demand for more taboos to sensationally break, or by his inability to see past his just-as-ubiquitous penchant for overly stylising scenes already operating at near-full abstract tilt.
But again, with Breath, the riddle continues riddling: by far the most interesting aspect of this film – indeed, I believe of all of his films thus far- is the completely stylised use of space and more importantly performance in the four-men-to-a-cube prison scenes. By directing these scenes as dance/abstract movement sequences (even the austere cell set is a straight dance set: three blank walls, floor), it finally pairs his trademark’d restraint and lack of dialogue with something both perfectly suggestive and dramatically harmonious.
As such, it is his first post-Isle effort to really rival that film’s successes. What will this mean for our crazy Ki-Duk? It would seem that he while he does have a whole style affair o’ his own, he still ain’t one for a canon, so I guess we can only expect more of his TM’d dynamism to come. But hell, in the hands of…dare I say it? A lesser director? Really? Well, I just did…anyway, it could have been so much Paul Fucking Haggis styled pathos-opera, what with the actual prisons and the unhappy spouses…I mean Jesus, prisons are some fucked up shit, yeah? There’s the always handy ass-raping thing, the mean wardens, we’ll get some gangs in the background, just working out like they do in the movies. Naomi Watts/wet noodle Tim Robbins as the unhappy couple, that Mexican Gael Garcia Bernal with some face scar as our prisoner, and look at that. Something at least as fucked up as anything Kim Ki-Duk has ever done. So go get Haggis. He really fucking deserves it.
