Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
Gangsters don’t get to have moral qualms.
That’s the brutal lesson learned by high-ranking enforcer Sun-woo Kim (Byung-hun Lee) in A Bittersweet Life after he disobeys an order from his boss, Kang, (Yeong-cheol Kim) to execute Kang’s young girlfriend if Sun-woo discovers her to be unfaithful.
She is, but the stony, taciturn Sun-woo experiences a moment of conflict and decides to spare the girl. Unfortunately, this act of compassion results in Sun-woo being thrown to the sharks of the South Korean underworld, of which many members already have a bone to pick (or break) with our suit-clad, hyper-capable protagonist. It’s not long before the slick Sun-woo is reduced to having to literally crawl out of his own grave, among other indignities and brutalities.
This being a South Korean revenge film, Sun-woo’s suffering is grueling, as is the eventual comeuppance he dishes out on those who wronged him.
From writer/director Jee-woon Kim, A Bittersweet Life shot Byung-Hun Lee to international prominence as a leading man, and served as a major announcement that Kim was a filmmaker to watch out for. Both men’s reputations have only grown in the years since, thanks in part to later collaborations The Good, The Bad, The Weird, and the riveting, repulsive I Saw the Devil.
But A Bittersweet Life is where it all began, a stylish neo-noir that follows a very bad man as he does very bad things to even worse people.
Next Week’s Pick:
Winter is here. We’re midway through the final season of Game of Thrones as fans wonder how (and if) their favorite characters will wind their way through end of the epic saga based on — and ultimately beyond — George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.
In 1983, legendary artists Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta created their own elemental fantasy saga. Our next pick is the similarly titled Fire and Ice. The animated epic is available to watch on Amazon Prime.
Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday!
Our Guests
Adrian Torres:
Actions have consequences. For every action, there is an equal or opposite reaction. No good deed goes unpunished. These phrases get bandied about often, but are all on display in Jee-woon Kim’s (I Saw The Devil) fantastic A Bittersweet Life.
Bursting onto the scene amidst the thriving revenge boom in South Korea during the 00’s, this film dances to a slightly different beat. Though punctuated with a couple minor bursts of action in its first hour, it unfolds at an unexpectedly slower pace. Not a complaint, as it allows everyone a chance to see Byung-hun Lee in his element. Much like Tadanobu Asano before him, Lee hasn’t made the leap to American super stardom, like most imagined. Yet here he gets to do it all. Equal parts stubborn, calculating, kind and badass.
Kim, working as director and writer, cares just as much about character as he does bloodshed. That’s ultimately what makes things work. For as ponderous, languid and focused as Bittersweet Life begins, it takes a turn into the chaotic for the second half. Yet in the best, most rapturous way possible. If you haven’t dared jump into the wonderful world of Korean cinema, this is a solid place to start. Even just for the “gun re-assembling scene.” Pair it with the equally fun City of Violence, for a great double-feature. (@YoAdrianTorres)
The Team
Of the great filmmakers to come out of South Korea in recent years, I would count Jee-Woon Kim as maybe my personal favorite, thanks to the triptych of genre-bending, hyper-stylized masterpieces that is A Tale of Two Sisters, The Good, The Bad, The Weird, and I Saw the Devil. Kim makes films that go to extraordinarily dark and upsetting places, but always with a camera that is so fluid, and a color palette so bursting with variety, that you can’t help but be engrossed by the films even as their contents push you away.
A Bittersweet Life, Kim’s riff on the heroic bloodshed/gangster noir subgenres of crime story, is a welcome addition to that line-up. Byung-hun Lee is an impossibly cool and polished leading man, his presence more than keeping the film engaging during the long preamble before things get vengeance-y. When he is unleashed in the film’s second half, Kim keeps finding new ways to up the ante and put the character and audience on their toes, wringing both tension and humor out of the obstacles encountered on the path to revenge.
The film doesn’t have a great deal to add to the subgenre besides execution, but Kim executes the holy bejesus out of the thing. You’ve seen this story told a thousand different ways before, but you’ve never seen it done like this, this well. (@theTrueBrendanF)
The ultimate nightmare outcome of the Pulp Fiction scenario in which your mob boss asks you to watch his girlfriend for him, A Bittersweet Life is my very favorite Korean film of all time. And Korean cinema offers a stunning array of amazing contenders for that title. The film is gorgeous, if intentionally clinical. Star Byung-Hun Lee is one of the most handsome men on the planet, and his character Sun-Woo is cooler, tougher, and more brooding than you. Every other character in the film seems aware of this and just want to kill him because of it. An absurdist streak courses through the veins of A Bittersweet Life, with catastrophic loss of life via violent set pieces all coming about because men are stupid, vapid creatures who can’t suck up their pride and who’d rather violently murder one another than lose face. This is a stylish, cool, poetic action film about a mob enforcer whose downfall comes about because he can’t bring himself to kill his boss’ young girlfriend. It’s men being boys, but doing it with so much elegance and blood loss. Kim Jee-Woon makes fantastic, no-holds-barred cinema, and this ranks among the best Korea has ever produced. (@Ed_Travis)
Ed highlighted A Bittersweet Life in 2014 as a “Pick of the Week” title. His full review is well worth checking out below!
https://cinapse.co/pick-of-the-week-a-bittersweet-life-is-the-best-korean-film-3193f24bcb8d
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P4YG73KHHo
Next week’s pick: Fire and Ice