« Timeless Bottomless ? »

나쁜 영화

This is a memorable Korean film title, “Timeless, Bottomless”, also known as Bad Movie 나쁜영화,

a striking piece of cinema hard to describe, some sketches from the life of poor teens and homeless, never seen before and after, such a mix of fiction and documentary, and still yet, it seems that no other Korean film have tried to look so deeper onto this side of Korean society.

This film symbolizes some of what art should be for me. Every film of that director are also some of the steps of my “film buff” life.

I discovered 나쁜 영화 in France, through this article, because the film has been very surprisingly broadcasted on French TV.

This film is very hard to find, so take every chance you can. The film is not even listed in Naver because it’s sometimes seen as an erotic censored film. In DVD, you may indeed have to look for a VCD with this astonishing cover, among erotic films, the real “bad movies”.

거짓말

More generally, any film by this director, Jang Sun-woo, is strongly worth to be seen. He was one of the most influential figure in Korean art of the eighties and nineties.

Three highlights :

The scandalous Lies 거짓말, which went in Venise competition and have been distributed in some countries, including France, but was banned in Korea (well, it’s somewhat erotic and  film adapted from a banned novel, so…). It generates quite some buzz at that time.

Road to racetrack 경마장 가는 길 (1991) is an heartbreaking story with one of the main actress of the end eighties and nineties, the wonderful Kang Soo-yeon 강수연.

Check also or Resurrection of the Little Match Girl 성냥팔이 소녀의 재림, a kind of blockbuster which put an end to his career because it’s one of the most weird thing (hard to call that a « film ») ever made, some self-conscious auto-destruction of a filmmaker burning the budget of the producer while fingering the distributor and asking to the viewers : « can you bear that scene? No? I knew it. » But one again, a film like you’ll never see anywhere else…