Tag: Kim Bo-young

The Distributors (유포자들, Hong Seok-ku, 2022)

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When Yu-bin (Park Sung-hoon) finds himself being blackmailed after being drugged in a club and videoed by an attractive young woman, he can’t help but feel hard done by. A teacher who once aspired to making films, he’s on the verge of marrying his fiancée Sun-ae (Kim So-eun) who is from an incredibly wealthy and very conservative pro-Japanese family, but if any of this gets out he can kiss his comfortable life goodbye. His focus is not, however, on how he shouldn’t have gone to his friend’s night club after promising Sun-ae he wouldn’t, but how he can cover all this up so she doesn’t find out he took two girls back to their flat when she was away on a business trip.

Hong Seok-ku’s The Distributors (유포자들, Yoopojadeul) never quite keys in to the fact that its hero’s a bit of a slimeball who nevertheless thinks he’s a good guy, and more often than not falls into his hard done by mindset. This might, however, echo the perspective of the average man in a society in which illicit photography has become a hot-button issue. As the film opens, Yu-bin is inflicting corporal punishment on two boys who’ve been caught taking inappropriate videos of women, which is perhaps not the best way to deal with this issue. Though he emphasises that they’ve done wrong, he’s also sort of on their side in that he agrees not to take this any further in case it damages their futures. Ji-ho, in particular, is on track to get into Seoul University and Yu-bin can’t really work out why he might have done something like this. The other boy Seong-min, happens to be his fiancée’s younger brother and predictably blames everything on Ji-ho.

It is then quite ironic that Yu-bin finds himself a victim of a video taken without his consent that shows him in a compromising position. Seven years earlier, he’d been accused of posting revenge porn after a former girlfriend broke up with him and had to pay her legal compensation. He claims that he didn’t intentionally leak it, but that his friend Sang-beom (Song Jin-woo) found it on his computer and uploaded it to the internet to make money on amateur porn sites. But again, his focus is more on how to make this go away rather than the harm he may have caused to Ga-young. She tells him that her life’s been ruined and that it’s pure hell to feel as if everyone’s looking at you wondering if they’ve seen the video. He, however, offers her money and suggests they settle this “like civilised people”, which is in itself not so different from blackmail while suggesting that she’s being unreasonable in not letting the matter drop.

Meanwhile, what Yu-bin might actually be worried about is that he’s made a tape of him and Sun-ae that she may not even know about or have consented to. In any case, his carelessness has meant that this video too might end up online ruining her life in the same way as Ga-young’s while the consequences for him are only mild humiliation and the breaking of his engagement. It’s not exactly clear how he and Sun-ae ended up meeting, but there’s a mild implication that he’s only really with her for the luxury lifestyle she provides while her father, who objects to the marriage because Yu-bin is not of their social class, also offers him career advancement in sponsoring a film department at the school. 

The blackmailer, Yu-bin, and his friend Sang-beom all make ironic references to this being like a Hitchcock movie, though Yu-bin is not really a “wrong man” so much as one running away from his own cowardice and imperfections. In his film class, he shows the children Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid, which is certainly an ironic choice given that it ends with a direct message warning men of the dangers of adultery and to always remember their duties to their family as husbands and fathers. Even Yu-bin’s sadly looking out through a rainy window echoes Kim’s cinematography, though Yu-bin is still in the mindset of feeling sorry for himself rather than coming to the realisation that even if it’s not Ga-young who is punishing him, he has never really faced his role in what happened to her or accepted responsibility for his failure to safeguard her privacy. Only now, when it’s him, does he begin to understand not only that he’s been selfish but that he’s failed in his role as a teacher by not figuring out what was going on with the boys and the videos while focussing on protecting their futures rather than those of the young women around them who deserve safety and respect but are provided little of either by a male-dominated society.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Dream Songs (너와 나, Cho Hyun-chul, 2022)

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Teenage friends wrestle with a sense of mortality, frustrated longing, and future anxiety in the etherial feature debut from actor Cho Hyun-chul, The Dream Songs (너와 나, Neo wa Na). Set shortly before the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster and shot in a washed out soft focus with a hazy nostalgic quality, the oneiric drama finds its conflicted heroine coming to an appreciation of the solipsistic qualities of obsessive love while preparing to cross the line between adolescence and adulthood in fearing she may not return from her upcoming trip or that the her that returns will not be same and the world will have moved on without her. 

The trip is only four days, but for Sam (Park Hye-su) it represents the end of her adolescence and the beginning of adulthood. As the film opens, she wakes up in her classroom after having a disturbing dream that something bad is going to happen to her best friend Ha-eun (Kim Si-eun) who is currently in the hospital though only for broken leg after being hit by pedal bike on a zebra crossing. So upset is she, that Sam manages to convince her teacher to let her leave early to verify that Ha-eun is OK with her own eyes and try to convince her to come on the school trip to Jeju with her, broken leg and all, so that whatever happens happens to them together. 

In the repeated dream imagery, it’s being left on her own that Sam seems to fear. She doesn’t want to be the only one who survives or the only one who dies and leaves her friend behind though as she confesses there was something that felt peaceful in her dream on looking at a corpse that might have been her own. The school trip to Jeju is one that many teenagers take in a quite literal rite of passage, but it’s also tinged with additional anxiety in the painful reminders of the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster, directly referenced via a radio broadcast, in which many school children taking the trip from the area where the film takes place lost their lives. Sam’s impending sense of foreboding causes her to reevaluate her relationships and especially that with her best friend Ha-eun for whom she has developed romantic feelings she is unsure can be returned. Afraid to leave without saying anything but also worried she may be rejected and end up imploding the friendship too, Sam’s internalised conflict ironically blinds to her Ha-eun’s individual suffering in having recently lost her pet dog as well as her disappointment on missing out on the trip while recovering from her accident. 

Cho frequently lands on the image of clocks, often stopped, which hint at time running out while there are frequent allusions to death and drowning from the bird Sam finds on the ground by the school to the girls’ final parting seemingly taking place in front of a stranger’s funeral with mourners talking outside while people carry funeral wreaths directly past them. While the lines between dream and reality continue to blur, Sam sees images of herself in the two little girls playing together in the park and another with her grandmother who “saves” a toy dinosaur from drowning in an environment in which it is unable to survive. She and Ha-eun chase a lost dog and eventually end up on opposite sides of a fence which is the outcome Sam most feared, but are eventually reunited and able to have a more emotionally honest conversation now that Sam has come to an understanding of the self-involved qualities of her romantic obsession. 

Even so, for the first part of the film it isn’t entirely clear if Sam’s feelings are indeed romantic or if it’s more a case of intense teenage friendship that causes her to be jealous of others that might be spending time with Ha-eun while preoccupied with the identity of the mysterious “Humbaba” whom Ha-eun apparently wanted to kiss in a diary entry Sam was presumably not intended to read. Sam’s feelings are made clear in a letter she doesn’t have the courage to send while she seems to fear that time may slip away from her and Ha-eun won’t be there when she returns from her trip. Yet what she ends up awakening to is more like self love, or at least no longer fearing “Joy” will fly away from her when she’s not looking. Cho’s hazy, poetic coming-of-age drama excels in capturing the joyful quality of teenage female friendship and diffidence of first love if tinged with a note of melancholy nostalgia in the wake of a devastating loss.

The Dream Songs screened as part of BFI Flare 2023

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Beauty Water (기기괴괴 성형수, Cho Kyung-hun, 2020)

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“Nothing matters more than being beautiful” according to an ironic statement made by a crazed revenger apparently both consumed by and resentful of South Korea’s obsession with conventional “beauty” standards. Beauty may well be in the eye of the beholder, but in this case the beholder has a noticeably conformist eye which is why it’s become something of a running joke that every manufactured pop star, model, or actress, has the same face. Not to be considered “beautiful” is to be relegated to a kind of underclass in which one’s thoughts and achievements are not accounted credible to the extent that employment prospects and class status are often dependent on meeting closely controlled constructs of physical beauty. Though it is true that men are also increasingly subject to these same definitions of attractiveness, they are not usually faced with the same kind of “invisible wall”, as the heroine of Cho Kyung-hun’s animation Beauty Water (기기괴괴 성형수, Gigigoegoe Seonghyeongsu) later puts it, which so limits a woman’s prospects in the fiercely patriarchal society. 

Yaeji (Moon Nam-sook) is a case in point. Ironically working as a makeup artist, she is regularly insulted by those around her including diva of the moment Miri (Kim Bo-young) who has her banished from the room, not wanting to see such an “ugly pig” so early in the morning. Only new recruit actor Ji-hoon (Jang Min-hyeok) treats her with any kind of kindness, remarking on the peculiar beauty of her eyes and later suggesting they do his makeup in a quiet corridor so she won’t be subject to Miri’s green room tantrums. Unexpectedly asked to fill-in for an absent extra sitting at a table laden with food, she later finds herself going viral, branded a “greedy fatty” online while journalists start bothering her at home trying to get her side of the story. She locks herself away in her room and refuses to come out. It’s then that she receives a mysterious text message followed by a parcel containing “Beauty Water”, an experimental substance which claims it can make even the least attractive of people “beautiful”.

“I just want to be loved” Yaeji plaintively claims, fully believing love is something you cannot have when you are not beautiful. Tragically she later realises that she was loved after all in recalling her parents’ reassurances during a traumatic childhood episode in which she came second in a ballet competition convinced that she danced better than the other girl but lost out because of her “ugliness”, but rather than learning to love herself in rejection of socially defined notions of conventional attractiveness Yaeji goes down the dark path of the quick fix entrusting her future to Beauty Water. She rebrands herself as Sul-hye and embarks on the cynical life of a vacuous influencer, dating various wealthy men but dismissing them all in her caustic interior monologue now confident enough to feel she can do better but leveraging only her looks in order to catch a useful man rather than trying to forge a life of independence. She is now fully a prisoner of the oppressive and tightly regimented gender-based social codes of a fiercely patriarchal society. 

Nevertheless, in the grand tradition of experimental serums, Beauty Water changes her soul as well as her face. Obsessed with the pursuit of perfection in beauty, Sul-hye becomes increasingly violent and aggressive, bullying her parents into lending her money for extra treatment by holding them responsible for giving birth to an unattractive child. We hear TV reports of young women in their 20s going missing and half-wonder if Sul-hye herself or someone like her, another victim of Beauty Water, may be responsible, but equally we see that the entire entertainment industry which Sul-hye is now trying to enter as another means of attaining success and fulfilment is entirely built on the exploitation of female “beauty” which is itself used as a means of control. Ji-hoon, apparently kind and sensitive, retires from showbiz because he can’t live with its manipulative cruelty and warns Sul-hye about Miri’s manager whom he believes bought Miri her career through pimping her out to “powerful” men and then embezzled all her money. Miri has since gone mysteriously missing. 

Finally we’re shown that appearances can be deceptive, that the “beautiful” are not always nice, nor exceptional in any other way than their physical appearance, and are unfairly prized by a superficial society. Judged for her purchases at the convenience store Yaeji stumbles on the way home while her building’s security guard offers no help, only the rude instruction that she should lose some weight then she’d be able to walk better. Meeting Sul-hye, the same guard reacts quite differently. Suddenly nothing is too much trouble, which might just be a problem of the opposite order in its vaguely threatening creepiness but just goes to show the extent to which a woman like Yaeji is held in contempt while those like Sul-hye are placed on a pedestal. 

Internalising a sense of shame and inadequacy in “failing” to meet these “arbitrary” standards, Yaeji is content to destroy in order to remake herself. “Say goodbye to the face you know”, Beauty Water’s instructional video teases before descending into surreal gore as a woman literally slices away her ugly facade to expose the beauty hidden beneath. Reminiscent of Perfect Blue, Beauty Water’s B-movie sensibilities send Yaeji/Sul-hye into increasingly paranoid and uncertain territory, desperate to remain “beautiful” so that she might be loved but never learning to love herself while quietly murdering her essential self to attain a soulless image of idealised beauty. A late swerve into an unintended transphobia nevertheless undermines the central messages of the dangers inherent in society’s obsession with aesthetic perfection as the heroine struggles to escape her internalised shame only in an extreme act of self-destructive masking. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)