This review may contain spoilers
No Oldboy, but that's ok.
Park Chanwook turns the page and leaves behind the mechanisms of revenge to tell of a different kind of love within the bare walls of an asylum. Our spoiled eyes recognize the extravagant cover that could only come from Mr. Vengeance, but the content offers nothing more than lighthearted entertainment.
In the full conviction that she is a cyborg, half human, half machine, young Younggoon (Lim Sujeong, A Tale of Two Sisters) burns herself badly while trying to recharge her batteries. She is sent to an asylum where she chats with the soda machine, goes on hunger strikes and instead of eating the institutional food, licks batteries to regain her strength. The staff tries everything from electric shocks to force-feeding through the nose, without much success.
But then she meets Park Ilsun (South Korean megastar Rain, Speed Racer), a male patient who, after being gang-raped in the army, sewed his anus together and now hops around like a rabbit. Hoping to take advantage of Ilsun’s kleptomania, Younggoon persuades him to steal her ability to feel sympathy so she can destroy the evil doctors surrounding her, something to which Ilsun agrees and he learns the rules of her strange world in the hope of giving her back her appetite.
Having completed his sweet revenge trilogy, which included the masterpiece Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the downright leaden Oldboy, and the visual candy Lady Vengeance, Korean director Park Chanwook leaves his dissection of the mechanisms of revenge to step into the world of fantasy, where just about anything can happen. With the revenge trilogy box set on the table, it is easy to call the comedy I'm a Cyborg... a career step into a completely new path for the director who usually draws such dark brushstrokes, when everything is pastel-colored and the humor is largely farcical. But if there is something that characterizes Park Chanwook's films, it is his way of unabashedly crossing genre boundaries and then of course the visual playfulness, and we get both here.
Because of course he would never settle for a film that didn't look outrageously good, we are dazzled right from the usual ape-like opening credits camouflaged among all the electronic equipment and props in the film's Metropolis-flirting opening sequence in a factory environment, to the moments of visual effects magic that occur when we get to follow into the head of a Cyborg among machine guns, alpine peaks and giant ladybugs. In the world of dreams, you get the feeling that Park Chanwook has discovered Michael Gondry. But despite this, the story, framed in such an exclusive and expensive gold frame, would do just as well as a stripped-down theater play on a bare stage in the nearest high school auditorium. We understand quite quickly that even crazy people in a crazy world need love, so unfortunately 107 minutes of detours around the subject become a bit tiring.
I found myself sitting unengaged waiting for someone to get their teeth pulled, because if we're being honest, it's my understimulated eyes and my repressed bloodlust that have been longing for more Park Chanook impressions on the big screen, not my hopes of seeing a new One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or that the girl's favorite Rain would turn out to be some new McMurphy. I've seen enough Korean comedies to realize that it's not my cup of tea, that humor can be experienced as very strange and infantile by the uninitiated, and so it is here. The gaps between the small flashes of brilliance become too large in this witty and petty love story that hardly violates the extravagant visual style that has become Park's signature, but unfortunately forgets that we have to keep our eyes open to experience it.
In the full conviction that she is a cyborg, half human, half machine, young Younggoon (Lim Sujeong, A Tale of Two Sisters) burns herself badly while trying to recharge her batteries. She is sent to an asylum where she chats with the soda machine, goes on hunger strikes and instead of eating the institutional food, licks batteries to regain her strength. The staff tries everything from electric shocks to force-feeding through the nose, without much success.
But then she meets Park Ilsun (South Korean megastar Rain, Speed Racer), a male patient who, after being gang-raped in the army, sewed his anus together and now hops around like a rabbit. Hoping to take advantage of Ilsun’s kleptomania, Younggoon persuades him to steal her ability to feel sympathy so she can destroy the evil doctors surrounding her, something to which Ilsun agrees and he learns the rules of her strange world in the hope of giving her back her appetite.
Having completed his sweet revenge trilogy, which included the masterpiece Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the downright leaden Oldboy, and the visual candy Lady Vengeance, Korean director Park Chanwook leaves his dissection of the mechanisms of revenge to step into the world of fantasy, where just about anything can happen. With the revenge trilogy box set on the table, it is easy to call the comedy I'm a Cyborg... a career step into a completely new path for the director who usually draws such dark brushstrokes, when everything is pastel-colored and the humor is largely farcical. But if there is something that characterizes Park Chanwook's films, it is his way of unabashedly crossing genre boundaries and then of course the visual playfulness, and we get both here.
Because of course he would never settle for a film that didn't look outrageously good, we are dazzled right from the usual ape-like opening credits camouflaged among all the electronic equipment and props in the film's Metropolis-flirting opening sequence in a factory environment, to the moments of visual effects magic that occur when we get to follow into the head of a Cyborg among machine guns, alpine peaks and giant ladybugs. In the world of dreams, you get the feeling that Park Chanwook has discovered Michael Gondry. But despite this, the story, framed in such an exclusive and expensive gold frame, would do just as well as a stripped-down theater play on a bare stage in the nearest high school auditorium. We understand quite quickly that even crazy people in a crazy world need love, so unfortunately 107 minutes of detours around the subject become a bit tiring.
I found myself sitting unengaged waiting for someone to get their teeth pulled, because if we're being honest, it's my understimulated eyes and my repressed bloodlust that have been longing for more Park Chanook impressions on the big screen, not my hopes of seeing a new One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or that the girl's favorite Rain would turn out to be some new McMurphy. I've seen enough Korean comedies to realize that it's not my cup of tea, that humor can be experienced as very strange and infantile by the uninitiated, and so it is here. The gaps between the small flashes of brilliance become too large in this witty and petty love story that hardly violates the extravagant visual style that has become Park's signature, but unfortunately forgets that we have to keep our eyes open to experience it.
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