Director: Park Chan-wook
Running time: 105 minutes
****
IS MENTAL illness the new black? No sooner have we recovered from Ryan Gosling's romance with a sex doll in Lars And The Real Girl than South Korean vis
ionary Park Chan-wook is delivering a love story set inside a mental asylum. Not just any mental asylum. A mental asylum on a grand scale, conceived like a futurist dream, designed and choreographed to the nth degree. With Alpine yodelling.
After the darkness of his vengeance trilogy (which included the brilliant, brutal, squid-chewing nastiness of Oldboy), Park has lurched into a world of whiteness with a romantic comedy that somehow manages to redefine romance and comedy.
This is not 27 Dresses. It is Barbarella reimagined by Gary Numan as a sequel to Singin' In The Rain. It is Tim Burton joining Kraftwerk to record a soundtrack to Alice In Wonderland. This be madness, yet there is method in it. Young-goon (Lim Su-jeong) is a young woman who works on an assembly line making radios. The workers are encouraged by instructions issued through loudspeakers, and Young-goon obeys them, even when the voice of authority tells her to push some wires into her wrist and plug herself into the wall.
Soon enough, her eccentricity wins her a ticket to the psychiatry department, where she encounters Il-sun (Asian pop star Rain), whose personality disorder requires him to play ping-pong in a rabbit mask. Young-goon's condition worsens as she develops an eating disorder, doing without food, and getting energy by licking batteries. Convinced that she has become a cyborg, she starts enjoying the company of soft drinks machines and lights, and thinking about her schizophrenic grandmother, who believed she was a mouse.
Now, it is possible my notes about this film are misleading. There are a number of lunatics, with disorders of varying degrees of peculiarity, and it's quite hard to keep up. There is the boy who is so shy he can only walk backwards; the fat lady who wears socks so she can go sleep-floating. And there is poor Il-sun, who has an advanced appreciation of his own insignificance, and fears he may soon turn into a dot. But he also has the ability to steal emotions, so he goes around the hospital harvesting traits that will keep Young-goon alive. He steals her sense of sympathy to stop her feeling sad, and gifts her the ability to yodel so that she can cheer herself up.
All of the Lewis Carroll logic is delivered in a sterile hospital environment, but it's a mistake to think that Park is saying anything about the reality of schizophrenia. This is a matter of choreography, and of human emotions as abstract qualities. It's also about the director's struggle to explore love. No surprise, then, that the film's most dramatic scene comes after Young-goon is given electric shock treatment, and finds her fingers have been converted into guns. Vengeance is a hard act to follow.
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At the Filmhouse, Edinburgh, from Friday; then DCA Dundee, May 2
