Korean film tells an intriguing tale
Published 10:32 pm Thursday, August 23, 2007
The subject of cosmetic surgery gives South Korean director Kim Ki-duk a provocative jumping-off point in “Time,” a genuinely mysterious new film. This one gets under your skin, as it were.
The movie opens with gross documentary footage of actual plastic surgery, which makes you wonder why anyone would choose to go through it. (Surgery, that is, not watching the movie.) Then, in a scene that will be repeated later in the film, we meet a woman walking out of the clinic, her newly sculpted face hidden.
Soon enough, we take up the story of two other people, their love affair stalled after two years. Seh-hee (Park Ji-yeon) is a perfectly attractive woman convinced that her boyfriend Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo) is bored with her.
Her mania about this leads her to disappear for six months, in search of a new face and body that will excite her lover. But she doesn’t tell Ji-woo what she’s doing, so he misses her for those months, as he uncertainly meets other women … until a strangely familiar waitress shows up at the cafe he frequents.
Now she calls herself See-hee, and is played by Seong Hyeon-a. But if this is the same woman who left Ji-woo six months earlier, why is she playing a cat-and-mouse game?
“Time” doesn’t answer its questions in a literal way, which might make it appealing to the “Memento” audience. But there is something haunted and sad at its core, which gives its guessing game some resonance.
I liked the way Kim kept returning to the same locations — the cool little coffee shop, or the beachfront sculpture garden decorated by erotic images of intertwined lovers. These remain the same, even if the characters keep altering their own looks.
Kim is the prolific, sometimes controversial director whose “3-Iron” and “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring” garnered considerable international acclaim. “Time” scales back from the suspended beauty of those films, but its points about how we “see” people, and ourselves, are intriguing.
