Title: Samaritan
Girl
Director: Kim Ki-duk
Released: 2004
Starring: Yeo-reum
Han, Ji-min Kwak, Eol Lee, Hyun-min Kwon, Yong Oh, Gyun-Ho Im, Lee
Jong-Gil, Shin Taek-Ki
Plot: Jae-Young
(Yeo-reum Han) is an high school student who also moonlights as a
prostitute while her best friend Yeo-Jin ( Ji-min Kwak) manages her
dates and acts as a lookout as the pair plan to use the money to
escape to Europe. However when Jae-Young killed trying to escape from
the police Yeo-Jin trying to deal with the loss of her friend decides
to track down every man Jae-Young slept with.
Review: Despite
being viewed as the enfant terrible of Korean cinema, Kim Ki-duk for
one reason or another has never managed to gain the same kind of name
recognition that the likes of Takashi Miike or Sion Sono or even Park
Chan Wook. Perhaps its due to his ability to move between making
arthouse movies like “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring”
and “3-Iron” aswell as more shocking fare like “Bad Guy” and
“The Isle”. Here though he gives us a film which sits on the
boundary line between his two styles.
To say this is a
film about teen prostitution its a surprisingly upbeat movie with
Jae-Young seeing no shame in what she is doing to raise the money the
pair need for their tickets to Europe, though the reasons why are
never clarified. Still Jae-Young who comes across like some
otherworldly presence constantly reassures her friend that she enjoys
these dates that the pair arrange for her, even citing the connection
she feels with some of them in particular a musician (Yong Oh) who
acts as the catalyst for the main meat of the film as following
Jae-Young’s baffling escape attempt of jumping out of a forth story
window and landing on her head, which somehow she survives only to
later die in hospital asking to see the musician who she claims to be
in love with.
This relationship that Jae-Young has with the relationship is one of the only times that we see any kind of tension between Jae-Young and Yeo-Jin and who are not only clearly best friends but at the same there is the hint of somthing else between them, more so when Kim Ki-duk seems so keen to include so many bathhouse scenes between the play
Its worth noting
that this isn’t a film that you can watch questioning the logic of
anything happening, because here Kim Ki-duk is flying in the face of
logic and instead just telling the story he wants to tell. This of
course is the only way I can explain why Yeo-Jin sees the best way of
honouring her friend is by sleeping with all the men that Jae-Young
did before returning their money. Perhaps its to try and find the
same connection that Jae-Young had with these men who she previously
is shown dismissing as being losers or perhaps its an attempt to live
in her skin for awhile, the answer is unclear and certainly not
clarified by the film.
The real twist here
comes when Yeo-Jin’s police officer father Yeong-ki (Lee Eol)
discovers what his daughter is doing though not understanding why nor
choosing to investigate the reasons he instead embarks on personal
mission to intimidate the clients. This imitation quickly escalates
with Lee Eol seemingly channelling Beat Takashi’s performance in
“Violent Cop” during these scenes as he shows up to the family
dinner of one of the clients, unflinchingly slapping him around in
front of his family before leaving as calmly as he entered, the fact
that the man is shown throwing himself out of the dinning room window
only serves as a grim encore to the scene. Yeong-ki’s mission
against these men climax’s in a brutal toilet beatdown.
The final act of the
film comes as something of a gentle let down with Yeo-Jin and her
father head out to the countryside, both of them unable to tell the
other about what they have been doing while the finale plays out with
an air of unease as your not sure if her father plans to kill her off
or not which going off his actions leading up to this spontanious
visit to her mother’s grave it really could really go either way.
A strangely
watchable film even though at times its unclear what is supposed to
actually happening let alone the direction which Kim Ki-duk is
choosing to take the film, something only made the more unpredictable
considering his aforementioned love of playing with the audiences
expectations of his work. At the same time while not as angry as his
earlier films, it lacks the artistic whims of his later work as it
falls between the two worlds and perhaps to this extent makes it the
best starting place for his back catalogue.
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