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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THIRST A few months ago, publishers decided to hasten the fall of Western civilization by releasing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book in which Elizabeth Bennett discovers the charms of Mr. Darcy while also killing zombies. Now we get Thirst, a retelling of Emile Zola’s19th century novel Therese Raquin—with vampires. But it’s no gimmick; it’s a measured, eerie, beautifully-shot thriller with memorable images and layers of intriguing detail. Thirst is the latest film from Park Chan-wook. Park, along with Bong Joon-ho, director of The Host, is part of a new wave of Korean filmmakers who have become popular in America—to the amusement of the gods, I’m sure, as both men are supporters of the Democratic Labor Party, a tiny left-wing Korean outfit notable for its sometimes shrill anti-American and anti-Japanese nationalism. Park’s movies rarely cohere as a whole, but their individual scenes often scorch into the brain. His best known film, the uneven Old Boy, features a hammer fight that might be one of cinema’s defining moments of the decade. Thirst, which Park co-wrote with longtime collaborator Chung Seo-kyung, is his most cohesive and moving picture to date. A selfless Catholic priest, Sang-hyun (played by the great actor, baby-faced Song Kang-ho), agrees to volunteer for a dangerous medical experiment in Africa. During the experiment, he’s infected with a virus that makes him break out in boils and vomit blood. To save his life, doctors give him a blood transfusion. He dies, but miraculously returns to life—only to discover the transfusion has left him with some peculiar quirks: he’s developed a taste for blood, sunlight makes his skin burn, and, in one of the film’s more imaginative touches, his senses are so acute he can even feel microscopic dust mites biting into his flesh. Temptation soon comes his way in the form of Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), a disturbed young woman whose physical needs aren’t answered by her husband, a sickly, good-natured doofus spoiled by his bossy mother. Tae-ju is in hell, and the filmmakers do a good job of making her home, crowded with bric-a-brac and oppressively cozy, the kind of place that would drive a lusty young woman like Tae-ju running barefoot at night through the streets of Seoul—anything for a moment’s escape from such stifling, bloodless domesticity. Tae-ju and Sang-hyun’s initial meetings and illicit courtship, when they awaken each other sexually and propel the plot towards its inevitable sanguinary turns, are some of the best scenes in the film. When Sang-hyun, endowed with superhuman strength, bounces along rooftops with Tae-ju laughing in his arms, it brings to mind, of all things, Superman flying with Lois Lane above Metropolis from the Richard Donner movie—and is a surprisingly subdued, believably poetic moment. (This is not to say everything’s perfect—a few scenes in the middle depend on advance knowledge of Therese Raquin to make sense of, and some of the religious themes are clumsily handled.)
Recent vampire movies, like
Twilight and Let the Right One In, for all their differences,
seem to have discovered a trope that resonates with viewers—the vampire
provides the lonely hero or heroine with a romantic escape from everyday
life, from the boring and inadequate (but usually decent) people they’re
stuck with. Thirst follows this path, too, but it never shows
the snobbish condescension towards ordinary characters the way Let
the Right One In did (whose proletariat Swedes served merely as
blackly comic late-night snacks). And though Thirst makes us side
with Tae-ju’s yearning for escape at first, it gradually, and maturely,
shows us truths about her character, and the costs of her insatiable
longings. Brendon Nafziger
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