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Turned into a hooker in Bad Guy, Seo Won surveys her tawdry new world.
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Bad Guy
Opens Fri., March 18, at Northwest Film Forum
Imagine if Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster had actually gotten together in Taxi Driver, and you'll have some idea how this 2001 South Korean film works. The violent obsessive stalker here is a pimp, Han-gi (Cho Je-hyun), who scarcely utters a word the entire movie. (The huge scar on his throat gives you some idea why and speaks volumes about his character.) The girl he falls for, virginal 21-year-old student Sun-hwa (Seo Won), isn't yet a hooker, but never underestimate the transformative power of love. So smitten with Sun-hwa is Han-gi that he forces a kiss upon her in the park; then, rebuffed and humiliated, he conspires to make a whore of her. And does.
Hey, I like a good romance, too, and Bad Guy does observe certain conventions of the genre. There are scenes on a beach, rain-slickened streets bathed in neon, and lots of long, smoldering stares. Most of the latter, of course, come as Han-gi impotently peers through a see-through mirror while Sun-hwa tearfully services her clients. (By this time, she's confined to a brothel by debts she can never repay.) His vengeance is so complete, so powerful, so possessive and overwhelming that it begins to look like . . . love?
Either you'll go along with that premise by director Kim Ki-duk or you won't. His last film to make it stateside, the monks-on-an-island art-house hit Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall . . . and Spring, couldn't have been more different—on its serene surface. But there was some violent sexual obsession there, too, only off-camera. Here, Kim generally refuses to look away. The whorehouse scenes aren't terribly graphic, but they are disturbing; and the violence—inflicted by fist, brick, knife, glass shard, and even a folded-up poster—will make you squirm. (For comic relief, Han-gi occasionally beats up his two loyal flunkies.)
Though acted sympathetically, codependent Sun-hwa is never convincing as a character. (Han-gi, scarily, seems all too real.) Repellent in some regards, Bad Guy is more of a dark fairy tale than a conventional story; its pimps and hos can almost be seen as archetypes, like wolves and princesses in an enchanted world. Here, however, there's nothing magical awaiting when one ventures through the looking glass. (R) BRIAN MILLER
Ice Princess
Opens Fri., March 18, at area theaters
With its familiar and talented actresses, including Kim Cattrall (playing a skating coach, of all things) and Joan Cusack, one might hope that this simple story about a young, scholarly girl (Michelle Trachtenberg) with dreams of being a famous figure skater would at least be bearable. Unfortunately, Princess can't even match those modest expectations. The plot lacks imagination and substance: Brainy high-schooler decides to try ice-skating to impress Harvard recruiters, puts eyeliner on for a show and realizes she's beautiful, falls for the boy who drives the Zamboni, and finally reconciles with her strict, disapproving mother (Cusack). Worse, Trachtenberg's teen heroine can only be described as annoyingly lackluster. (If Harvard doesn't work out, there's always community college.)
It's one thing to suspend your belief in gravity for The Matrix, another to accept that Trachtenberg could land a triple axel within weeks of going to the rink and without any training (apart from her mathematical equations that work out the physics of the maneuver). One of the movie's big plot turns comes when Cusack discovers ice skates hidden in Trachtenberg's book bag. Princess would've been a lot more interesting if she'd found some normal teenage contraband there, like crack. (G) HEATHER LOGUE
It's Easier for a Camel
Runs Fri., March 18–Thurs., March 24, at Grand Illusion
The ungainly title of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's 2003 directorial debut is taken from the famous passage in the Gospel of Mark, yet Camel isn't a spiritual film; class guilt is the only higher principle its characters can agree on.
Tedeschi, who regularly acts in French and Italian films, plays Federica, the middle child of a filthy-rich Italian family living in Paris. Since guilt is merely an issue, not a premise, she adds a few pinches of conflict, starting with Federica's boyfriend, Pierre, who resents her wealth. When Federica finds out her mother once cheated on her father, Pierre sniffs that his mother was far too busy cleaning rich people's houses to even have time for an affair. Her mother fesses up to cheating because her father is dying, which leads, in turn, to the usual mix of grief, moneygrubbing, and bitterness—nothing you couldn't find on The O.C. Between family squabbles, Federica pumps her local priest for the Big Answers, not unlike Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby.
Federica emerges as a likable heroine, prone to the kind of benign self-absorption that often develops in children of privilege, yet her struggle with the moral ramifications of wealth rings false. Tedeschi never makes up her mind about the family's fortune, its supposed Achilles' heel. No one seems particularly tainted by it, so when the film ends on a slightly dark note, it doesn't make sense. Gilmore Girls offers harsher, funnier satire of the rich; if Tedeschi intended Camel as an earnest look at the upper class, its light, romantic tone betrays her. Like Federica's dialogue with her priest, Camel not only fails to provide answers, it barely manages to ask any meaningful questions. (NR) NEAL SCHINDLER
