J. Hoberman
Tuesday, November 14th 2000
http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-11-14/film/imps-of-the-perverse/1

I read someplace (it might even have been last week’s Village Voice) that Korean food was the cuisine du jour. If so, it’s appropriate that Jang Sun Woo’s Lies—nothing less than the hottest movie in South Korean history—opens Friday at the Screening Room, Tribeca’s fashionable movie house cum restaurant.

Lay on that five-alarm kimchi: Lies tells the tale of the virginal schoolgirl “Y” and the 38-year-old sculptor “J,” who embark on an obsessive affair that, beginning with a graphic three-orifice defloration in a cramped hotel room, escalates into full-blown amour fou, complete with consensual s&m slugfest. Some things were meant to be. By the second passionate tryst, J is asking Y if he can beat her; afterward, she happily shows her friend the welts. (Not long after, she starts setting the erotic agenda.) Variety estimates that 90 percent of Lies is devoted to sex scenes. There’s an abundance of action—kinky and otherwise—which, voyeuristically shot by a roving camera and characterized by a naturalistic struggling out of clothes, doesn’t entirely seem to be faked.

Does the camera not lie? Jang, who maintains that both performers confided in him that “they could enjoy the whippings and beatings” and that this “probably lent [their scenes] a certain credibility,” is the arch transgressor of South Korea’s increasingly daring filmmakers. (His previous feature, a quasi-documentary on Seoul street kids, had the flavorsome title Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie.) Lies was made to shock, as well as to challenge local censorship—based, as it was, on a notorious Korean novel that was published in 1996 and immediately banned and pulped as pornographic. The author Jang Jung Il (no relation to Jang Sun Woo) was sentenced to six months in prison.

Intermittently, Lies complicates its truth with self-reflection. J provides a voice-over, even at one point referring to the novel in which he is a character. There’s a scene that’s broken up by the director and an introduction in which the principals, Lee Sang Hyun (a real-life sculptor) and Kim Tae Yeon (a fashion model), neither of whom had ever acted in a movie before, are interviewed as to their feelings about appearing, mainly nude, in so explicit a drama. Y’s avid, bemused personality—or is it Kim’s?—complements J’s dogged single-mindedness. So does the film. Jang ignores the interlude in which J leaves for three months in Paris, picking up the narrative only with the sculptor’s return to Korea, where J goes straight from the airport to the college campus where Y is studying statistics.

Appropriate to its celebration of antisocial individualism, Lies is shot in a loose, semi-vérité style; it has a jagged construction and a fresh, jazzy look. Jang is fond of using a wide-angle lens in narrow spaces or shooting a scene from the perspective of an elevator surveillance camera. The music pulsates; the sex scenes are sometimes pixelated to enhance their mania. The movie is not without perverse humor. Nor is it entirely devoid of tenderness—even when the beatings, now administered by Y, get a bit more extreme. After Y’s jealous brother burns down J’s house, the couple—who often suggest a pair of sulky babies—begin a voyage from motel to motel, living on sex, fladge, and J’s maxed-out credit card.

At once distanced and heedless, Lies manages to be lighter and less pretentious than any description suggests. The movie’s playful aspect can’t be denied. There’s a priceless scene wherein J and Y are rummaging around a construction site, oblivious to the workaday world in their search for a suitable thwacker. Not for nothing has Jang described the couple’s total self-absorption as a failed utopia, the “dream of living, eating, and fucking without having to work.”