Kim Jae-Hong – Windows on Worlds

A worried policeman nervously asks Yeonji (Im Chae-young) if the rumours are true. They say that everyone who works at Studio Forte ends up going mad or dying, but Yeonji has only just started working there herself and it’s too early for her to say whether that really is the case, though it’s true enough that the building has an eerie energy. Even a visiting film director remarks that the atmosphere is unusual, though it doesn’t seem to have put him off returning. The director, Jeonghwa (Lee Jung-eun), is one of the best after all which is why Yeonji took this job in the first place.

On arriving at recording studio Forte, Yeonji remarks that it seems like a great place for inspiration but the building itself is anything but inspiring. A block of concrete and glass, it stands ominously and incongruously in the middle of nature as a defiantly manmade structure intent on disrupting the natural order. It feels oppressive, rigid, and constraining. Not the sort of environment that best serves creative impulses despite the well-appointed interior with its modern design and copious light from the large windows.

Yeonji walks the surrounding forest in wonder, but at the same time there’s something odd about it in a bewitching sort of way. Her colleagues seem to be haunting her, seemingly standing around and staring while she’s otherwise disappointed by the lack of faith Jeonghwa seems to have in her. At the first team briefin,g she neglects to give Yeonji anything to do and then tells her to help her colleague Haejoon finish his section of the score for an upcoming film. Only Haejoon already seems to be having strangely. He looks ill, and sometimes doesn’t even turn up for their work sessions to the point that Yeonji ends up working with another colleague, Dojin (Cha Se-jin), to get everything finished on time.

“Everything that happened here is real.” Haejoon later says cryptically after screaming that something is “here” and means him harm. Yeonji begins having visions of the forest and an oily, muddy figure along with images of death and fire. In any case, even without the existential dread of lingering supernatural threat, it’s easy to see why this place might drive someone mad. Yeonji tries asking Dojin what’s happening with credits on the movie and he brushes the question off, replying only that Jeonghwa will sort it out, which sort of implies only she will actually be credited. When the director arrives for a test screening, Jeonghwa treats Yeonji like the tea girl and explains that she’s “new”, but the director asks for her opinion anyway and she gives it, honestly, though it contradicts Jeonghwa’s. The producer (Cho Sueun) claims she could tell that Yeonji wrote the tail end of the music because it was “different”, which gives her the feeling that her work may be good after all and that Jeonghwa is playing it too safe with her conventional approach.

Though she had been somewhat mousy and earnest on her arrival, dressed in an elegant if constraining outfit, Yeonji gradually becomes bolder and wilder. She lets her hair down and dresses in darker, looser clothing while often talking back to Jeonghwa and contributing her own contradictory opinions. But in the end none of it matters. She realises that Jeonghwa is basically exploiting her, getting her to ghostwrite the score while taking all the credit. The director makes a drunken pass at her, and while confused by her reaction explains that this is her big opportunity. Both Jeonghwa and himself only got to where they are by playing the game, which means submitting oneself to this kind of quid pro quo.

It stands to reason that Yeonji’s barely suppressed desires would eventually burst through as they eventually do in the bloody climax building towards a crescendo of emotion in which Yeonji appears to become smaller and smaller behind the piano as the music overcomes her as if she were possessed. Only now has she released her creative freedom, playing Jeonghwa’s piano with a furious abandon that threatens to burn the whole edifice to the gound. Drawing on 1970s folk horror in it its aesthetic the film has an intriguingly eerie, surreal sensibility deepened by its own unsetting score as the evil haunting the studio begins to make its presence felt if only in Yeonji’s mounting resentment towards an industry that does indeed view her as little more than an inconvenient ghost in the machine.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kim Ki-duk’s latest reviewed at uk-anime.net.

A Moebius strip is a twisted loop with no beginning and no end. No matter where you start your journey, you could pass the same point many times without ever crossing a boundary. It this inexorable and infinite cycle to which Korean auteur and professional cage rattler Kim Ki-duk now turns his unfaltering gaze as the ancient wheel of sex, death and violence trundles on untroubled by our modern day pretences of a more enlightened society. Completely dialogue free, Kim presents a contemporary greek tragedy framed as the blackest kind of satire.

Things are not going well in this quietly suburban, middle class household. It’s not even breakfast time but the father has retreated to his study because the mother is already perched on the stairs, a large refilled glass of red wine in hand and all while the bemused teenage son looks on disinterestedly. This is a normal morning, nothing has changed very recently. Things are about to change though – quite drastically. Finally at the end of her tether and filled with a Medea-like fury the mother decides to put an end to her husband’s philandering days by means of a kitchen knife. She is extremely drunk and half crazed so her husband easily disarms her at which point she comes up with another idea – if she can’t hurt her husband himself, she can cause him pain by proxy and takes her knife to her unsuspecting son’s room. Literally emasculated by his mother, the young son must then face difficult questions regarding the nature of his masculinity, particularly as it appears to others. His father in turn must cope both with the guilt of his own sins being visited on his son as well as that of his own behaviour as a father, husband and finally a man. Never one for easy answers, Kim Ki-duk’s examination of modern day Korean society continues apace but its implications are far more wide reaching.

Though Kim is firmly focussed on his native Korea, the questions he presents are as old as the hills and common to almost every culture (at least to those that also male dominated). It’s not the first Korean film where the successful father is having an affair with a girl young enough to be his daughter, or the first where the wife’s humiliation spills over into violence but the nature of her revenge is so specific, and perhaps bizarre, that it brings its own particular line of discourse. The first question is one of traditional masculinity and how that is defined between men. The son seems to feel emasculated and looks for different ways to explore his manhood but is at pains that no one should discover the nature of his injury. Though he approaches the woman who had been his father’s mistress (played by the same actress who plays the mother), he backs off when she reaches for his genitals. Later, he makes an attempt to step in when she’s being hassled by a gang of dangerous looking youths but quickly subjugates himself to them and, when they do actually gang rape her, pretends to join in rather than stand up to them or have them think he is less than a man.

The fact the object of his adolescent lust is both his father’s mistress and looks eerily like a younger version of his mother is another ancient problem where, as they say, everyman kills his father and beds his mother. The father’s first reaction to his son’s predicament is to look for ways someone without a penis might experience orgasm – the answer he comes up with also speaks volumes and points to another of Kim’s ideas of circularity, that pain and pleasure aren’t so much linear poles but a circular continuum where both can exist equally at the same time as a sort of self feeding vortex. The second idea he has is a penis transplant, and as the boy’s is no longer available he makes the ultimate decision to sacrifice his own source of pleasure in favour of his son’s. Unfortunately, it comes with some sort of homing device which means it only works with the mother (perhaps her ultimate revenge). The relationship between father and son changes again as they become rivals in an incestuous love triangle only now it is the father who has become impotent and the son, literally, the man of the house.

If you think this all sounds a bit ridiculous (is a penis transplant even possible?) you aren’t wrong, and Kim Ki-duk knows too. Odd as it might sound, Moebius is a comedy, even if a macabre one. Sexual violence, incest, penis theft – not traditional comedic ingredients it has to be said but Kim Ki-duk’s very definitely of the it’s better to laugh than cry school of thought and the sheer scale of Kim’s vision gives the entire project the sort of absurd grandiosity that makes it very difficult not to find humour even the bleakest of situations. Kim isn’t proposing any answers here so much as offering a series of (critical) observations of human nature. The world isn’t going to change just as it hasn’t changed since Euripides first started telling stories of people driven to the edge of madness. We’re all walking on a Moebius strip, repeating the cycle endlessly completely unaware that, at some point, we began walking on the other side. Like the best Greek tragedies, Moebius is has a feeling of inevitability driven by the most primal of emotions. Once again Kim proves he’s not afraid to look deep into the dark heart of human nature and, though not for the faint hearted, Moebius is one of his most accomplished films to date.

Tag: Kim Jae-Hong

Forte (포르테, Kimbo Kim, 2025)

Moebius (뫼비우스, Kim Ki-duk, 2013)