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Edited, Produced & Directed by: Kim Ki-duk.
Director of Photography: Seong Jong-mu.
Music by: Noh Hyeong-woo.
Released by: Life Size Entertainment.
Language: Korean with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: South Korean/Japan. 97 min. Not Rated.
With: Seong Hyeon-ah, Ha Jung-woo, Park Ji-yeon, & Kim Seong-min.

On the surface, the plot comes off a little like a trashy love story gone completely and maddeningly awry. Ji-woo (Ha Jung-Woo) and Seh-hee (Park Ji-yeon) have been in a relationship for two years, but she has convinced herself that despite his repeated admission of his love for her, and hers for him, he cannot love her face, or so she thinks. His gaze and sexual desires wander elsewhere to other women, and he can only be aroused when thinking about another partner, leading her to leave him all of a sudden without a word. She gets her own place (how this is done or how she seems to have no familial ties is never explained properly, but that’s beside the point), and undergoes plastic surgery to alter her face and body.

Six months pass, and Ji-woo isn’t quite yet over the abrupt end to their relationship. His friends set up dates for him to no avail. Then Seh-hee reappears, though this time as See-hee (Seong Hyeon-ah), a waitress at the cafe Ji-woo frequents. They strike up a friendship, leading to romance, playing right into Seh-hee/See-hee’s plan to see if her suspicions are confirmed about him being attracted to other women.

There’s something haunting to the notion of “love conquers all” when done right, and a real sense of tragedy permeates the downfall of not just Ji-woo, in his broken emotional state, but of See-hee/Seh-hee as she falls further into a frenzy of paranoia. Not since the obsessive madness surrounding personal appearance in Vertigo, or maybe slightly more comparatively That Obscure Object of Desire (where Buñuel had two actresses play one character), has a film been this thought provoking in dealing with the realities of compassionate love and shallow physical intentions.

No matter how fantastical the plot, Kim Ki-duk's direction remains lucid. (Even Ji-woo has a hard time not confusing Seh-hee with See-hee.) If his film does go into a delirious and sometimes savagely funny warp in the last section, it’s a great wonder that the actors can keep such tricky material afloat. Ha Jung-woo comes off extremely realistic as the typically nagged boyfriend early on and then subtly brokenhearted later, and the actresses come off equally well-rounded as the paranoid girlfriend and the calmly crazy lover. Jack Gattanella
July 13, 2007