Gentleman: No One Is Who You Think They Are

I'm sensing a new genre emerging in movies. Let's call it "liar noir." These new crime pics are modeled after The Usual Suspects, a film in which the action which we see on screen isn't necessarily what happened at all. To the contrary, in movies like Kim Kyung Won's Gentleman (which I saw Sunday) and Yoon Jong-seok's Confession (which I saw a few weeks ago), we're presented with seedy, twisting narratives, only to learn that the tellers are fabricating the stories and what actually transpired is something else...partially. In both cases, that revisionism works against the overall picture. Because you never know if another level of deceit is going to emerge and the explanation, disputed. You're also left to wonder why you've spent the last hour hearing a made-up tale.

No fan of The Usual Suspects myself, I conjecture that this mode of storytelling is the direct result of living in a culture in which facts are repeatedly disputed, falsehoods promoted, videos doctored, and testimonies reneged. As a mirror of reality, Gentleman is not without interest. But as a movie-going experience, I'm left unsatisfied. Ju Ji-hoon is the private detective duped into being a stooge framed for a possible murder. Park Sung-woong is the amoral powerbroker who hustles on the market and markets unsuspecting women. Choi Sung Eun is the indefatigable prosecutor who isn't afraid to take on society's higher-ups. All are good. That is, if that's who they are.

Mulberry: She Gets Around

In an effort to spur online viewership (I suppose), the curators at the Korean Film Archive have resorted to creating new categories for their YouTube channel: Chuseok Comedies, Summer Scenery, and E.R.O.T.I.C. among them. Are the all caps in that new subsection intended to draw the eye or to evade the censorship filters? Whatever the reason, I ended up picking a movie from that playlist — Mulberry, the story of a woman who resorts to sex as a form of commerce after being abandoned by her gambling husband. Be forewarned: Lee Doo-yong sex-driven drama is neither titilating nor tawdry.

Lee Mi-sook's rustic sex worker feels like a pragmatic hustler then demeaned communal property. Her main problem doesn't end up being the men with whom she's swapping "favors" or the husband (Lee Dae-kun) whom she's deceiving or even the gossipy, catfighting wives. It's the dimwitted, lecherous, peeping tom (Lee Mu-jeong) of a farmhand who can't fathom why she won't put out for him too. Why do the men go crazy for her? As one woman at the laundry hole puts it: "Some women are born with a honey bush and some with a thorn bush."

Mulberry isn't arousing, unless you find the sight of a woman's behind while she's taking a pee a turn-on or the sound and sight of rushing water in a mill — in lieu of actual intercourse — hot, hot, hot. The actual sex scenes go from short to comic to depressing. According to IMDb, the original negative got damaged so a few scenes are missing. Whether they've been restored here or not doesn't matter much. It is what it is and it's kind of strange.

Ballerina: A Different Type of Fairy Tale

I don't know when Netflix first posted about the impending arrival of Ballerina but I've been waiting for it impatiently ever since. The image of a messy-haired young woman (played by Jeon Jong-seo), clearly in action-movie mode, coupled with this short description was just so irresistible: "Grieving the loss of a best friend she couldn't protect, an ex-bodyguard sets out to fulfill her dear friend's last wish: sweet, sweet revenge." I suspected the subtext here was "a young-woman/former-assassin in a loving relationship with lesbian undertones takes on the patriarchy, one slay at a time." And I wasn't far off.

Our heroine, Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo), is indeed a loner assassin who finds a new life purpose after a reunion with a high school crush Min-hee (Park Yu-rim) inspires her to massacre a mass of misogynist pimps, drug-dealers, and sex traffickers — particularly a long-haired, porn entrepreneur (Kim Ji-hoon) and his drug king boss. Will they be able to survive once Ok-ju gets gun-power from two geriatric arms dealers (Kim Young-ok and Joo Hyun) and further fuel for her fire from a sex traffic survivor (Shin Se-hwi)? Doubtful. Shoutout to director Lee Chung-hyun and whoever the cinematographer was for making the whole affair look so damned beautiful.

Confession: Liar, Liar

Confession is a silly movie. Basically a two-hander about a nefarious businessman (Yoo Min-ho) and a woman (Kim Yunjin) who he's trying to get to be his lawyer, Yoon Jong-seok's not-so-thrilling thriller is built around the conceit that she'll only represent him in court if he tells her every dastardly thing he's done leading up to and following the murder. So while he's proclaiming his innocence for killing the woman (Im Jin-ah b.k.a. After School's Nana) with whom he was having an affair, this guy is quite open to admitting bribery, adultery, hit-and-run, insurance malfeasance, cybercrimes, aiding-and-abetting, destroying evidence, and murder... just not of his love interest!

Preposterous? Yes. I'd even go so far as to say Confession is ridiculous! Because eventually, you realize that everything you're watching is potentially a lie. We're not seeing things as they happen but events as they're being told. A character — the accused, the potential attorney — might revise their story five seconds later and then we'll see actions reflecting the new scenario they've concocted. Since neither character is particularly trustworthy, the single way to find out what's real is when other characters enter the picture (the cops, another lawyer, a husband) and we watch in "real time" what reality unfolds. Per usual, reality attempts to satisfy but falls a bit short.

Return to Seoul: Lust for Life Abroad

The adoption of Korean babies was international big business for decades. According to the American magazine The Progressive, the South Korean government raked in around eighteen million dollars annually via Korean baby adoptions abroad. That ended in 2020 (after a public outcry) but the legacy is still very much with us. Cambodian-French director Davy Chou's intermittently captivating Return to Seoul takes a fascinating look at the cultural disconnects that result when one such adoptee returns to her homeland somewhat impulsively. Admittedly, Frédérique "Freddie" Benoît (Park Ji-min) is neither your typical French expatriate nor your typical Korean ingenue. She's callous and curious, impetuous and petulant, unreliable and ambitious; a lost soul who can't decide whether she wants to find herself or self-obliterate.

In her quest to do one of the other, she bonds with a hotel clerk (Han Guka), reunites with her alcoholic birth-father (Oh Kwang-rok), has an affair with an older arms dealer (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) and causes mischief basically everywhere she goes. Chou creates a sympathetic portrait of Freddie initially — enhanced by some terrific acting by Kim Sun-young as a strugglingly bilingual aunt — but eventually this story goes off the rails. A long-awaited reunion with Freddie's birth-mother leads her to hike in Romania? I'm not saying such things don't happen but when our lead character sits at the piano keyboard to bang out a tune we come to realize that her fingerwork, like this narrative, slips a little too often to be called harmonious.