Lies

viewed April 23, 2000 at the Castro

For full information about this film, click here

My third consecutive night of the Festival found me going to see Lies -- perhaps the most controversial film of the Festival, banned in its home country of South Korea for pornographic content.  If you want to skip the events that led to my viewing the movie, please scroll past the following three paragraphs.  The actual review is marked with a red dot.

I started the evening off, appropriately, by lying to my mom that I was going to the bookstore -- I don't think most people could comprehend why a person would spend three consecutive evenings in the theater.  Especially when it's 8 bucks a pop, even with a membership discount.  I swung over to the Kabuki to buy a couple of advance tickets, immediately after which the total costs of my festival attendance started to kick in -- easily into the triple digits, that is, if I were to pay for every movie I saw.  It was then that I recalled how I had left the Kabuki last night -- and how it was possible to enter that way undetected.  I then spent my drive to the Castro regretting having bought those advance tickets.  I'll have to make up the difference by sneaking into a second feature whenever I'm there.

It's almost impossible to sneak into the Castro -- and it's such a classy establishment you'd feel guilty even thinking about it.  A classy establishment that plays some truly trashy films (they had a well-received revival of Douglas Sirk films some time ago... and now they were showing the smut I was about to witness).  One un-classy thing they did was make the audience line up for a couple of blocks outside in the bitter cold while the previous show let out.  It was then that a feeling of loneliness, which I'll elaborate later, began inside me.  I became very much inclined to talk to the person in front of me -- a garrulous albeit foul-mouthed fellow who was good-natured but a bit odd.  He would preface any discussion of whatever film we brought up with what The Bay Guardian thought of it, as if that was the bible of film opinion.  "I'm not interested in Three Kings -- the Guardian didn't like that... Oh, the Guardian seemed pretty mixed about Magnolia..."  After a while he started to creep me out, and I was glad to lose him in the throng of people entering the lobby. 

I found a seat in a crowd that was nearing capacity, only to have a man arrive and claim that it was his long before.  The man who sat next to him could barely speak English and wasn't going to confirm or deny the man's claim.  What I couldn't help noticing was that both of these men were by themselves, and they, plus the man I encountered before, were making me self-conscious of my own solitariness.  To get away from this, I obliged the seat claimer, and said I would search for another seat, to which he replied, "It won't be as good as this one."  I was definitely in the realm of strange and lonely people.

My fears were confirmed when I found a seat -- a much better one, I might add, closer and more central than the one I gave up -- next to another loner, this time all in black, with a kind of mean comic-book Archie look to him, red-haired, upturned nose.  But he happened to be the nicest of the loners, and the most interesting: he had spent a year in Korea and gave me some insight on the stringent social mores he had experienced there.  He also offered advice for getting a double feature out of the Castro: stay in the bathroom after the first show lets out.  Excellent advice that I just might put to use.

So, on to the movie itself... maybe I've been stalling all this time because I found this movie to be strangely lacking in substance.  One of those films that starts off in an ambitious way but gets terribly trapped in the parameters it has set for itself, so that it looks ludicrous in getting out.  This film shares a lot with Fight Club: a lot of beating and mistreating between two intensely attached characters, with some fancy-dancy editing thrown in to liven up the violence, all leading towards a very unsatisfying resolution.  This film was in some ways better: it was somewhat more conceivable and definitely had more heart, especially in its 18 year old female lead, a Lolita type who wholeheartedly dives into her sexual tutelage, every orifice open.  Over half of this 100 minute film consists of explicit sex scenes between her and a sadomasochistic 30-ish sculptor over a two year period.  Eventually the sex just becomes mechanical and gross, increasingly punctuated by intense, painful whippings and beatings from metal wires to tree branches to hoe sticks.  Which is too bad, because the film starts out in a very interesting way: with asides by the two lead actors discussing their roles and their feelings towards playing out their sex acts to the camera.  There's also an interesting outtake included where two girls are fighting -- but it seems that the director included these metafictional passages as a way of distancing the viewer from the content, thus mitigating the shock value -- and perhaps escaping the censors.  If that is the case, it is a greater disappointment since she could have used this dual-layered strategy to much more intriguing effect by extending it through the S&M scenes; at the very least it would have given the viewer a reprieve from the monotonous beatings.  

I left this film feeling even more bummed out about people and my own state of solitude.  It made me feel even more that there is little to really care deeply about in life -- that what one does invest his energies in are bound to leave him disappointed.  But this film -- not just the characters but also the execution of the film -- sorely lacks balance, trying too hard to shock at the expense of meaning.  It doesn't help my own life is lacking some meaning these days.  My daily activities of work and leisure are keeping me occupied beyond my capacity for holding on to meanings in a balanced way.  It seems that the other alternative for happiness is obsession, which I suppose this film warns against, if indeed it is about anything other than contesting the Korean censorship board.

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