The Isle

Sunday, December 9, 2007

I watched a bizarre movie with Shenan and my dad a few weeks back called Time. It's Korean, so right there you know it's probably not going to be a very mellow or restrained film. The plot concerns an obsessive young woman who becomes convinced her boyfriend no longer loves her. So she decides to disappear from his life, get complete facial-reconstructive surgery, and then re-enter his life 6 months later and pretend to be another woman.

As I alluded to before, I've noticed that the Koreans seem to like really melodramatic, extreme behavior in their movies. No one ever seems to act like a real person, but in the best of their movies, there is usually an internal logic where it all makes sense in context of the exaggerated, heightened, fictional world the characters inhabit. It's not at all like real life, but maybe does hit at some essential human truths. Like Oldboy.


Time, I thought, I was a pretty good example of this. The characters were compelling and sympathetic in their own, whacked-out unrealistic way. And the story was so fucking bizarre that you couldn't help but love it. I think I knew the movie was something special when the main character puts on a cardboard mask of her old face in an attempt to convince her boyfriend that she had returned. You don't see that every day.

The Isle is an earlier film by the same director, also dealing with obsessive love, but this time throwing in more extreme sadomasochism. It is about a mute woman who becomes obsessed with a suicidal man who lives in a tiny house on a little floating barge thingy and...

...Ok. You might have noticed that I talked a lot about Time before even mentioning The Isle. That's because I liked it a lot more. The Isle had some effective imagery, but didn't have much of an entry point to relate to any of the (underdeveloped) characters. And, as it goes along, I think it relied too heavily on trying to shock the audience with big, gross-out moments.

Time definitely got fucking weird, but it kept throwing in little human moments to make us care about what was going on. Like one part where the heartbroken boyfriend gets drunk with friends and does some really, really bad karaoke. Funny and relatable. The Isle mostly consists of long, silent scenes of the two main characters staring at each other in "meaningful" ways, while tension boils under the surface. Later, they jam fish hooks into places they really shouldn't go. At the end, like Time, the movie ends on a surreal, poetic note that makes no sense whatsoever. In a good way.

The cinematography and whatnot seemed nice (although the DVD I had was not the best quality), and they do a lot of the obvious shots of reflective water and sunsets and all that. But I'm not sure it really has anything to do with the rest of the movie.

I still might check out another film by this director, but The Isle did not live up to the promise of Time. Not poetic or insightful enough to illicit an emotional reaction, and not weird enough to be enjoyed for weirdnesses sake. More of a mild curiosity.