Karlovy Vary Dispatch. 1.

Time, by the Korean director Kim Ki-duk was the opening night film of this summer's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. It's a film about, among other things, plastic surgery. Who's to say that this isn't a subject whose time has come, for better or worse? (Let's bear in mind that the medium we're talking about involves putting images on celluloid and reshaping those images by cutting that plastic with a sharp blade. Let's also bear in mind that plastic surgery - the medical kind, that is - is one of the few growth industries in Los Angeles).

In Time, the twist is in the director's premise. It's not about the risks of vanity, which Stendhal called le désir de paraître back when dueling scars were in fashion, long before anyone thought of plastic surgery for cosmetic purposes. The real peril of plastic surgery here isn't that it could go wrong and turn a patient into a monster after the patient has invested her money and her future. Nor is it that plastic surgery can go right, and enable those uneasy about their appearance to indulge in newer depths of vanity. Plastic surgery in Time is an instrument that characters can deploy in the service of an obsessional anxiety in a relationship. Not that vanity has disappeared - perhaps it's just too obvious for this director.

It sounds like a subject for a sci-fi look at the near future, in which one activity has shaped the rest of life. Yet Kim Ki-duk's approach is straight-ahead realism.

Here's the story. Seh-hee and Ji-woo have been a couple for two years. Seh-Hee falls into violently jealous rages whenever another woman approaches her man. Yet her real obsession is with the notion that he might become tired of her - not because she is aging, but because her face will become too familiar. The answer, she figures, is a new face. And that's just what she gets from a plastic surgeon whose office has "before and after" pictures of a patient on twin doors at the entrance. (At a press conference the day after the film screened, Kim Ki-duk implied that Koreans use plastic surgery almost as frequently as they use make-up. The press kit for the film notes that some 50 percent of young Koreans around the age of 20 would like to have plastic surgery.)

Seh-hee has her surgery, but not before the surgeon goes to great lengths to discourage her, with videotapes of long complicated operations performed on women in all their bloody grotesquery. It's the kind of footage which, if it were shot in a slaughterhouse, would make you give up meat for a long time. She disappears after the work is done, and the lonely Ji-woo fights off a string of would-be lovers, until he falls in love with a waitress at the local coffee bar, See-hee, who has the same jealous fits as his previous girlfriend. In case you haven't guessed, the two women are the same person, although a different actress plays the new face. Naturally, the surgically-altered girlfriend, who's also the new girlfriend, uses her new romance as an opportunity to test the love that Ji-woo still professes for his old girlfriend. He says he's still in love with the departed Girl #1.

As the plot gets even deeper into obsessional illusions, Ji-woo decides to go under the knife himself. Is it a new first for gender equality? We never know whether he actually returns, although See-hee does sleep with a man who she thinks is Ji-woo, only to learn that the man is pretending.

Sounds complicated? That's the point, as Kim Ki-duk adds plastic surgery to the menu of consumers' choices now on offer to young urban Koreans, already struggling to regain sense of themselves. What do you give to the woman who has everything? An entirely new face.

Making a film almost every year, Kim Ki-duk has the rare opportunity, like a documentary filmmaker, to take on trendy topics, as he has in Time. (There's no lyricism here, quite deliberately, but also no sense of cutting corners in haste.) "In this case, a shock is necessary," he told the press in Karlovy Vary in response to questions about whether he included surgery footage to warn his audience against imitating what they saw on the screen. The director said that the surgery footage that looks like animal dissection comprises about five percent of the film. Had he included more, he added, he might not get an audience for his fable. (Let's see how easy it is for him to get this distributed. So far the film hasn't shown in Korea. The KV screening was its world premiere.)

He still might be losing some of that audience, and not because he's treading on Korea's new beauty vogue. In Karlovy Vary, the director made a special point to note that quotas for the amount of time that theaters in Korea devote to Korean films have been cut in half, opening cinemas up to even more American product, and he predicted that the effect of this change could be that he and his peers would be making fewer films. Now that's a problem that even plastic surgery can't solve.

Those new regulations have nothing to do with Love Talk, the Korean film shot in the US that is presented in this year's competition. (The Karlovy Vary competition is one of the best in years.) Shot almost entirely in Los Angeles, this film by Lee Yoon-ki finds disconnections among its characters, Koreans living in LA. Those disconnections are not just the mal du pays between the Koreans and the Americans in the land that the immigrants and their children have adopted. The other disconnections are among uprooted Koreans themselves, often sons and daughters of parents whose work ethic has demanded a sacrifice of real emotional presence.

No surprise that young Koreans phone the radio talk show hosted by Young-shin to air the frustrations that they can't talk to anyone else about. Family ties have broken down. Money doesn't fill the void, and love is hard to find. The various characters who work in video stores and massage parlors are filmed by cameraman Choi Jin-woong in silent meditative close-ups that call to mind the films of Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, which found discomfort in the abrupt disjunctions of modern society, despite the prosperity. Isolated car-captives driving around Los Angeles from empty job to empty apartment while they listen to the radio don't have to be Korean to be anxious, although the contrast with the strong family ties of the old country does make America look particularly bleak. As the tensions rise, so does the alcohol consumption, and things boil over into violence. While the debate over immigration intensifies, be prepared for other immigrant dramas that point to the sacrifices of living in America, the land of opportunity.

Posted by dwhudson at July 5, 2006 3:21 AM