A Bittersweet Life (2005)
달콤한 인생
Film details
Action · Drama · Crime · 김지운 · 1h 59min
Synopsis
Kim Sun-woo is an enforcer and manager for a hotel owned by a cold, calculative crime boss, Kang who assigns Sun-woo to a simple errand while he is away on a business trip; to shadow his young mistress, Hee-soo, for fear that she may be cheating on him with a younger man with the mandate that he must kill them both if he discovers their affair.
Verdict
Raw and realistic violence in a dark morality noir thriller.
In-depth analysis
South Korean cinema produces some of the most stylized and brutal noir tragedies of the contemporary landscape, and A Bittersweet Life is a notable exponent of the genre. The film follows a mafia enforcer who receives the order to kill his boss's lovers, but chooses compassion over blind obedience. That decision unleashes a spiral of violence that destroys him. The direction is precise, the cinematography elegant, the performances solid. The problem for families is not the moral arc — the protagonist attempts to do what is right in a world without possible redemption and pays the full price — but the MANNER in which it is told: realistic torture with pliers, burns, bloody executions, shootouts with visceral detail. The violence is not celebrated, but neither is it attenuated. It is auteur cinema for adults with a strong stomach. The film exposes the nihilism of the criminal world without glorifying it, but the level of explicit cruelty makes it completely inappropriate for minors or for family viewing.