“There Is No Such Thing As a Perfect Person…”
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2005)
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Han Ye-seul in
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A film that truly lives up to its title, by the end of Kim Gok’s revelatory new South Korean, no budget horror film Exhausted (Gogal) , which in every way transcends the limitations of genre and which contains the power to test one’s belief in the essential goodness of human beings, the viewer has been thoroughly bludgeoned into submission, but perhaps into grace as well. Developed in the director’s bathtub, this is auteur cinema that stretches the limits of decency.
Why should a film that depicts the untold horrors of Exhausted exist? Of what benefit could it possibly be for human kind? These are questions that I’ve pondered into the bleakest of nights after seeing the twenty-eight year old director’s debut as a stand-alone filmmaker (he has previously worked almost exclusively with his twin brother). To which I can only answer, “great cinema justifies itself”.
Pimp and prostitute/girlfriend live and work in a dive apartment where men on the outskirts of a destitute, unnamed South Korean city comes to have sadomasochistic sex with the flaccid, semi-retarded woman at the film’s center. They have a domestic routine of sorts, eating cheese sticks and porridge, attempting to fetch new bowls and silverware, taking walks along a dirt and industry strewn beach that inevitably turn into yelling matches and fights. They occasional go and hang signs that read “We have girl”. These excursion which of course, leads to more chases and hysterics. Eventually a homely young woman takes notice of the prostitute’s powerlessness and after one of many escape attempts on the part of the whore, rescues her from her provisional refuge among trashed tires on a the beach, but she too has intentions for the young woman that prove to be the most degrading and disturbing of all.
The first spoken line of the film is “You have a lot of shit in your stomach”, a line which pays off quite unexpectedly, at a moment late in the picture, once your stunned mind has is convinced that this terrifying film can’t get any more horrible (not in the pejorative sense). It pretty much sums up what’s on display here. This is the dirt cinema we’ve been looking for since Paul Morrissey; A by product of not just Morrissey but of filmmakers as varied as the Kuchar brothers and Takashi Miike, Exhausted exists on its own plane of depravity in the annals of modern narrative cinema, but unlike anything else that might fit that description, it is not without its share of plainly expressed truths about codependency and that small desire for self-destruction that exists in many of us.
The desperate inarticulateness of the characters and the rough and gauzy Super 8mm images make the surroundings seem as threatening for this woman in peril as they did for Monica Vitti in Red Desert (Il derserto rosso by Michelangelo Antonioni), another film of sexual malice amidst the ruins of modernity. Yet where the green clad temptress of Antonioni’s filmic universe could find some small salvation in her child, the only children in the land of Exhausted share the color of Ms. Vitti’s jackets, one which expresses a small oasis of hope in the cesspool of modernity in that film, but only affirms life’s passing and pain in Gok’s uncompromising new picture.
Screening out of competition in this year’s Bright Future section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam after debuting at Pusan last year, Exhausted towered over nearly everything in the Tiger Award competition. It had a visual rigor, and representational courage and a discomforting amorality that all the films in competition, many of which are very good, lacked; these qualities are as rare as they are stunning and shouldn’t be easily forgotten, something no one who every sees Exhausted will have the opportunity to do. It will haunt you until the end.
