Yapım :2000 Ülke : Güney Kore Süre : 86 dakika IMDB Puan : 7.0/10 IMDB ID: tt0255589
A.K.A The Isle (2000) International: English title
Oyuncular Jung Suh - Hee-Jin Yoosuk Kim - Hyun-Shik Sung-hee Park - Eun-A Jae-hyeon Jo - Mang-Chee Hang-Seon Jang - Middle-aged man
Bilgi :Mute Hee-Jin is working as a clerk in a fishing resort in the korean wilderness; selling baits, food and occiasionally her body to the fishing tourists. One day she falls in love to Hyun-Shik, who is on the run for the police and rescues him with a fish hook, when he tries to commit suicide.
Beautiful or sick, take
your pick
"The Isle" is a gruesome Korean film
that, as our reviewer can tell you from personal
experience, is not for the weak of stomach � but
it's also a beautiful, haunting parable about a
man in a woman's watery world.
"The Isle"
is the sickeningly gory Korean film that made me
unintentionally famous � as the queasy-stomached
critic who staggered from the theater and blacked
out in the lobby. I can't recommend
"The Isle" as a gastronomic experience, but
believe it or not, as a film it's one of the most
beautiful, evocative works I've
seen.
The
story takes place on a secluded bay with floating
shacks where city folks come in ones or twos or
threes for a fishing getaway. An unnamed woman
wordlessly minds the bay, boating from guest to
guest to provide food, coffee, furnishings and
transportation. And that's not all she provides.
"Come on up," one customer orders on her delivery
run. "We're going to need more than coffee."
Without a complaint, she climbs up onto the
platform and complies with his wishes. Other
times, she merely arranges for prostitutes to come
from the outside and do the dirty work.
Who
is this mysterious woman? It's soon clear that
she's not just a caretaker or a prostitute � she's
the spirit of this otherworldly place, both
benevolent and vengeful. We feel her presence
everywhere, seeing all, protecting her guests and
punishing their trespasses. People who do her
wrong are liable to find themselves wounded with
an icepick by some mysterious underwater force and
never know what hit them.
Into
this strange sea-goddess's realm comes an anxious
young man who's clearly running from some unnamed
trouble and wants one of the floating cabins to
hide in. The man and the woman eye each other
curiously over the following days, and their
efforts to get to know each other have both
touching and repelling results. He is slow to
realize it, but the woman is subtly pushing him to
change his life and his inner nature.
This
is, I think, a parable for male-female
relationships in general. So often, women have to
help the men in their lives finish growing up, or
else we'd spend the rest of our lives lying on the
couch with a sixpack watching wrestling and saying
"Whassap" to our buddies. This is that kind of
story about how women change men, but it's a
parable set in a mythical waterworld, not an
American living room. The "isle" of the movie's
title (actually, it makes sense to look at the
entire bay as an island from the outside society)
is a place where men think they can come to
indulge their most macho impulses but they're
ultimately enveloped in the woman's
domain.
"The Isle" is simply not suitable
for anyone who isn't extremely comfortable with
movie violence. There's a horrible scene in which
the man, seeing the police on his trail, attempts
to kill himself in an extraordinarily gruesome
manner, and that's not the last we see of director
Kim Ki-Duk's gory imagination. (I understand that
a critic at the Venice Film Festival also became
ill, and there was controversy over the film at
Sundance too.) Hollywood has long engaged in a
deplorable competition to one-up itself with
gross-out scenes in violent movies, and now Hong
Kong, Japanese and Korean films are heartily
joining in.
But that doesn't take away from
the beauty of "The Isle." It's hauntingly filmed,
with the bay silvery on the surface and murky
underneath. Actress Suh Jung (also seen in the
great
"
Peppermint
Candy
") is like a force of nature �
primal, sexy and dangerous. And the allegory of
the "isle" is unforgettably powerful, with or
without the stomach-churning parts.
