Kim Ji-woon
Bittersweet Life

Is it the branches that move, or is it the wind? Neither the branches nor the wind; what moves is your heart and your mind.

In the early 2010s, South Korean productions were even discussed in class. This is important because it really meant being accessible to everyone: to those who asked you if you had seen Sheva’s goal and immediately after talked to you about Old Boy (have you seen the Chinese Tarantino-like movie?), to those who indulged in hilarious wordplay with titles when dictating the agenda (Math, Italian, History, German... and Math again).

Amidst all this, a chubby fellow faithful to cinema for about eighteen years of life was going through his obsessive phase with Eastern psychological horror and had just finished watching Two Sisters by the good Kim Ji-woon. Once he realized he could trust him, he stopped talking in the third person. So, I dove into Bittersweet Life, which steps into the revenge territory fully dressed, creating a mix of elements quite common in the genre but dressed in a tuxedo from start to finish.

The protagonist, Sun-woo, is the trusted man of a powerful South Korean Boss and manages the elegant hotel where the first significant scene of the movie takes place. Significant because it immediately shows the sparkle we’re about to encounter, in few but well-aimed and furious blows: the narrative method that will be used to tell the long journey of violence awaiting Sun-woo; not a fingerprint on the car hood, not an object out of place, not a color thrown by chance, no shot left to itself. In the majority of episodes related to the South Korean genre introduced a few lines above, the direction stands out, not only for the quality but also for the empathy with which it communicates to the viewer. But while in most cases it works on deep, intimate, dark atmospheres, dictated also by rather complex scripts with a high level of content, here the mastery manifests on the surface, in a blatantly and sparklingly aesthetic manner. It is the film's strong point (which already has about ten years now, I mean TEN???), unanimously recognized, and consequently a target hit squarely. A small example of this splendid mix is the exchange of glances in the "final showdown": notes from the far west on the polished set of a place that pays homage to "La Dolce Vita."

That said, although Bittersweet Life draws from the most famous and illustrious fabrics of noir-revenge-and-even-half-pulp, and although it doesn't invest much in character development, preferring the visual storytelling of blind vengeful fury, Sun-woo's character has more precise traits, embodying a kind of invincible samurai and at the same time a man with a young and uncertain soul and heart, uncertainties that as soon as they manifest lead him to make the wrong choice (wrong according to the code of honor that the "sun-woo samurai" would have scrupulously followed). And in my view, he is tremendously different from the stereotype of the vicious and ruthless Beast who in the end hides the "heart of gold": firstly, because in this film the moment he reveals this side coincides with the moment he effectively makes his life hell, and secondly because this human nuance emphasizes his fragile and insecure side, creating a dualism narrated with a rhythm that literally makes time fly until the final unknown.

I don't know if the problem was how difficult it is to make a wordplay with Bittersweet Life, but the fact is that unfortunately none of my classmates mentioned it. Their loss.