Bad Guy (2001)

Plot – Spoilers:
A thug, Han-gi, wanders around town until his eyes settle on a college-girl, Seon-hwa, sitting on a bench. She’d briefly caught his attention earlier on the street, but now he’s a little bedazzled and he goes and sits right next to her. When her boyfriend turns up and the two appear to be looking down on him, he forcibly kisses her and gets beaten up for it. Han-gi doesn’t talk through most of the movie but we know he’s not mute because he can be seen on the phone, and eventually towards the end, his reason for staying silent is revealed. Anyway, his silence has its role because it’s only his expressions of want early on and the background music that help create the overarching theme of I too have the right to desire someone from a different class. But he goes about this in a convoluted way. Since Seon-hwa won’t acknowledge him, he traps her in a bizarre plot and has her thrown into a brothel where she’s pimped out to randoms.

Han-gi is the type of guy who beats a random drunk with a baseball bat and walks around with an unhinged silence that terrifies his loyal accomplices – like they’ve seen him do things they wouldn’t even dare imagine. It’s a credit to director Kim Ki-duk’s mastery and Cho Jae-hyun’s performance that you watch this violent man orchestrate a ridiculous series of events and yet it’s fairly clear from early on that he’s in fact deeply in love with the woman he’s tormenting. It’s almost as if – in his revenge, lies his romance. He could have raped her any number of times if his revenge were borne from hate, but he instead prefers to hide behind a one-way mirror and watch her get fucked by other men. And when he does get physically close to her, he just sits around in awe, wiping her puke off his body casually because it’s not disgusting since it came out of her mouth.

Thoughts on the ending – Massive Spoilers
It seems like Han-gi wanted Seon-hwa to not just become, but also feel like a whore, and a cheap whore at that. In his mind, she was so up above him, this was his way of bringing her down to a level where she was accessible. And even when she was accessible, he didn’t believe scum like himself were deserving of any love. So his idea of being with her forever was to continue to pimp her out, because that’s a relationship he could handle emotionally. Seon-hwa meanwhile appears to have fallen in love with her captor and tormentor and goes along with his ideas as that seems the only way to be with him.

The photograph thing could be a metaphorical take on the idea of fate that’s very strong in many Asian cultures – that them being together was destined to become their choice, as will her eventual suicide. Asian movies sometimes tend to be sentimental to the point of being maudlin. Well, this adds some of that sentimentality and then fucks it up.

Related Movies:

3-Iron (2004) Moebius (2013) Pieta (2012)