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.
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