Time.

"Turning Vertigo on its head, Time's brilliantly absurdist premise gets at the fundamental, misery-inducing disconnect between passion and intimacy like no other film I've ever seen," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve. "Haunting and incisive, Time's a rare film that dares to tell the truth about scars that never heal."

"At first, and even most of the way through, [Kim Ki-duk's] Time seems like a social-realist relationship movie, full of poetic observations about the fallacies of love and the fragile nature of identity in contemporary life," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Our central couple, the suave Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo) and the leggy Seh-hee (Park Ji-yeon), seem like hip and fashionable Seoul-dwellers, exactly the kind of young Koreans who go see Kim Ki-duk movies. Sure, Seh-hee is a bit pathologically jealous, prone to starting an angry scene if Ji-woo sneaks a peek at a cute waitress. But none of that conveys how dangerously insane this movie and its characters are."

Updated through 7/19.

"Kim has lost his damn mind," declares Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "There were rumors of this when The Bow debuted at Cannes in 2005 to such disastrous response that it never screened in New York. Summaries say that film was the story of a 60-year-old man who raises an adopted girl from infancy for the purpose of marrying her nubile teenage ass when she turned 17. Gross - and apparently unredeemed by stylish execution. But Time is almost as conceptually nutty."

At indieWIRE, Jeff Reichert declares that this "thirteenth film by that most disposable of Asian auteurs, Kim Ki-duk, should finally, definitively, expose the filmmaker's patented layering of ambiguities as nothing more than the tawdry covering-up of an empty imagination.... If you've seen Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another or John Frankenheimer's Seconds, then Time is certainly not worth a passing thought."

"There's a gothic chill to the film's raw depiction of going under the knife, as well as to the Vertigo-ish early going, during which Ji-woo begins to fall for the clearly bonkers Seh-hee version 2.0," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Yet there's a persistent, frustrating glibness to [Kim's] depiction of vanity, distrust, and possessiveness that undermines any serious examination of the thematic issues at hand."

"Time has been described as a comedy about the hollowness of relationships in a global consumerist culture, and it certainly is," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "But while the film's cultural context is of the moment, its depiction of romantic desperation is timeless."

"[A]ny unreserved accolades for this wayward talent will have to wait until next time," writes Jason Bogdaneris in the L Magazine.

"Time has an unbeatable premise, and writer-director Kim could've taken it in just about any direction, from black comedy to poetic romance to Hitchcockian dread to trenchant social commentary," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "It's a minor disappointment when he tries to do everything at once - in his preoccupation with scattered genre effects, he literally loses the plot."

Update, 7/14: "Kim Ki-duk has never had what you could call a light touch, and "Time" has the awkwardness of his work at its roughest, shuddering between flat-out allegory and shrill portrait of a demented relationship," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "And yet, before the film ventures into the realm of the isolatingly ridiculous, there is something to its morose portrayal of the trouble with men and women, and of love inconveniently enduring while novelty and passion inevitably fade."

Update, 7/16: "The film quickly sets itself up not as the deeply internal psychological portrait of the Hitchcock, nor the modernist socio-historical art film of the Teshigahara but rather moves in Kim's usual rhetoric of breezy allegory," writes Daniel Kasman. "It is a rhetoric using both generic conventions to structure narrative and deploy characters and what may be termed art-house cinematic conventions that use minimalism and coolness to distance the story and present it as a fable. This allegorical style has worked for the director in the past, but in Time the emotional melodrama and thriller semantics of the former seem to try and make up for just how thinly written the film is, with the pretensions and purported weight of meaning implied by the later approach 'enabling' the film to so poorly grapple its own subject under the guise of fable-like simplicity and cool, measured consideration."

Update, 7/19: "Ultimately, it's a strange and subtly told tale that successfully hacks into the desires and fears of most us who are trying to figure out how to make love work - without sewing it all back together into a nice, pretty package," writes Jerry Portwood in the New York Press.

Posted by dwhudson at July 13, 2007 6:00 AM