Lies

I just got back from seeing the new Korean film "Lies," a portrayal of a consensual BDSM relationship between an 18-year-old student and a 38-year-old sculptor.

First, the bad stuff: it's not a very good movie. Amateurishly filmed, with shaky camera work and some of the weirdest directorial decisions I've ever seen. This is not "Last Tango In Paris" or anything like it.

But if you can get past that, what's left at the core is one of the most sympathetic, honest and realistic portrayals I've ever seen of BDSM as it's actually played. The two types of players -- the sculptor is a primary sadomasochist, whose needs for BDSM play are strong, innate and non-situation-dependent; the student is a secondary sadomasochist, who derives her enjoyment of BDSM from her partner's reaction -- are accurately and sympathetically portrayed. Consent is scrupulously observed, with plenty of check-ins and other good communciation. The emotional reactions to play are dead-on. The bad things that happen in the movie take place because of outside intervention by the vanilla world, not because there's anything wrong or sick about the couple themselves.

As far as I could tell, most of the scenes of BDSM play were real, not staged or faked -- and they're intense. Switchings, canings, paddlings -- with lingering camera shots afterwards of welts and bruises. (One scat play scene was apparently faked, which was OK by me - shudder.) Some of the play was not up to community standards of safe technique; a shot of a garden hose thudding down right across the woman's kidneys had me cringing. But it also seemed true to what might happen in a culture which provides no information or support for its kinkyfolk.

Well worth seeing in a theater if you live in an urban center where it's showing, or adding to your video collection later on if you can find it.

This often startling account of a progressively S&M tinged love affair (and, yes, that is the right word for it) between an 18 year old schoolgirl and a married man twice her age remains currently banned in its native South Korea where it's considered pornographic. In a sense it is, considering how much of the film's running time is devoted to fairly explicit (at times clearly non-simulated) sexual encounters. What sets this film apart from other recent releases that have incorporated hardcore footage as part of their narrative (like the astonishing BAISE-MOI or Lars Von Trier's THE IDIOTS) is that here there is actual warmth and sensuality to the copulation sequences, even when the protagonists are beating the feces out of each other, making it much harder one presumes for moralists to condemn on grounds of lacking humanity or compassion. Not that they would allow themselves to be seduced by this deeply moving yet quietly disturbing film in the first place. I for one found it exquisitely erotic (and frequently sweetly funny with the lovers' DIY approach to S&M), even - or especially, perhaps - in its more extreme moments, all of which handled beautifully by the two non-professional leads. The pared-down visual style gives the movie an edge and intensity, as if you're watching real people in a documentary rather than a fiction film. The movie's English title is explained in the shattering last line. It would sound glib to call this a REALM OF THE SENSES for millennium's end but that's the comparison that comes to mind.

I was unfortunate enough to catch the last 15-20 minutes of this movie one late night. I was horrified. How it could be played on cable TV without some kind of warning in the title, i don't know.

It was on again last night. I dared not turn the channel.

It scares me that this movie was allowed to come into Australia. I mean, yeah its art blah blah, but how did it get thru those Christian groups who lobbied against eyes wide shut and that french film that had real sex. Cos this is not faked lovie dovie sex. Its awful, and it turned me off having sex if it looked like that! i mean, ew! wrongness!

So: If you're into the whole S&M beating the ass with stuff, well go ahead, watch it. But if you have a weak stomach, or cant handle graphic sex scenes, don't watch it.

Lies is a story of two people who have a sexual obsession. That is the whole plot, in a nutshell. They don't come together for any other reason than to have all out, straight up, kinky, beat-each-other-up sex and they're not pretending there is any other reason. They glory in it, they obsess about it, they talk about their last encounter and look forward to the next one. The best thing about it is the way it draws you in and makes you watch just to find out - where will all this end? To all the reviewers who complained about the grapehic sex, so, why did you watch it? You can't see five minutes of this movie without getting the idea, so what were you doing? Tied to your chair, maybe? Couldn't get free to turn it off? Held at gunpoint? What a bunch of hypocritical goober heads.

Neither of the protagonists is particularly attractive, not in the conventional way, and I didn't feel that anything was shown for pornographic purposes (although that would have been OK with me). It is simply an account of an intense sexual relationship, where the whole reason for being together is kinky sex, and this idea is followed through the film. You may not have any sympathy with the characters, or like them, or even be able to empathize at all; but you have to watch because you just know it is going to get more intense, and it does.

Each time J and Y come together, the sex gets more intense, more brutal, kinkier and nastier. They beat each other unmercifully, finding ever more severe objects to whale on each other with. Sounds kinda fun, doesn't it? The intent, though, is to show such a relationship and show how it develops, where it can go, and how it could happen. It even goes one better by making J an older man, an artist who is very class sensitive and somewhat tormented. Y is a schoolgirl, and her motives are never completely clear, as they probably wouldn't be to someone her age in this relationship.

I would never have watched this except for the reviews complaining about the graphic sex and violence. That got my interest quick, but then I was sucked in by the plot. I just had to know where this was going and predicted some big blow up at the end. I thought that possibly one would kill the other during a beating, or their families would intervene. Either way, I had to know what happened, and that, to me, is the best part of this movie.

I was at first disgusted with director Sun-Woo Jang because I had felt that he cheated me. Jang had the potential to create a strong, deeply emotional film about sex and its effects on people, but instead chose to focus his strength on the pornography element more than the actual human element. I couldn't see the characters at first and his sloppy introduction which blended both realism and cinema together was amateurish at best … yet this film remained in my mind for days after I viewed it. What stayed with me wasn't the story, it wasn't the characters, nor was it the apparent pornographic nature of the film, but the transition that Jang demonstrated between Y and J. If you watch this film carefully, you will see that both begin in an exploration phase of their relationship, eager to jump into the unknown, but not quite certain the next step. As they continue to meet, exploring new avenues of pleasure, they continually jump between the aggressor and the aggressed. Jang initially explores the idea that J is the one that in control of the situation, then hauntingly, the reversal happens when J becomes obsessed with Y. It is a very small change, and due to the graphic content of this film, it can easily be missed, but it is there. It becomes apparently clear near the end when J cannot live with Y, as their meetings become less frequent, and J attempts to become a part of normal society. This was a huge and very exciting element to this film to see right before your eyes, but alas, it was the only element of this film worth viewing.

I will ignore those that speak of this film as nothing more than pornographic, because there are human elements at the core of this film, as underdeveloped as they are, they are there. It is a film about a facet of our lives that is very rarely explored in cinema or talked about in the papers. What happens behind closed doors is never known … or so we should believe. While the act itself does becomes repetitive after a bit, director Jang tries to change it up a bit with some constantly changing scenery. Our characters are continually moving from hotel room to hotel room to best quench their thirst for each other's flesh. This is fun at first, but again, Jang's repetitive streak seems to make it feel boring than exciting. This leads me to the biggest issue that I had with this film. Jang had a great story with Gojitmal, but where he failed (outside of the obvious choice to focus directly on the pornographic side) was that he took scenes, repeated them time and again, without changing in front of us to allow us to get to know the characters. Where was Jang going with this movie? Did he want the sex to tell the stories, or did he believe the characters would? He failed in this sense because by the end of the film we know so little about Y and J that we could care less how they resolve themselves. The ending seems almost random at best as Jang attempts to create a final resolution for our two, absolute unknowns, of this film. I have to give Jang some credit for trying, but not much. He attempted to create some sub-stories that would create the personal element that we were lacking, but they just couldn't congeal well together. Y's brother and J's wife were those plot points, but again, due to him focusing so strongly on the sexual element, these stronger sub-stories became un-rememberable and down-right dull. Maybe it was just how I viewed this film, but outside of the sexual scenes, nothing else worked together. We knew nothing about J and Y and that is why Gojitmal failed.

Finally, I would like to say that this film could have benefited from having a strong score or a daftly remote music genre element to it to bring us, the viewers, closer to the emotions being felt by J and Y. From what I can remember, and I am trying to push this film far from my mind, I don't remember any musical undertones. Gojitmal may have been a stronger film if Jang either stylized it with music or done something to allude towards our character's beings. While I understand that he wanted the sex to speak for itself, there was just a technical element missing from this film that may have quenched a stronger desire for more. Technically, this was a poor film. Obviously an independent film in nature, it felt more like director Jang was trying to make symbolic references out of nothing instead of your typical independent of this nature. I didn't see as much of a social message or human element like mentioned above, I just felt like he threw this film together over the course of two weeks and understood that the sex would sell it enough. This was no Larry Clark production; this was sub-par and definitely needed some further technical clicks to develop it stronger than the final release!

Overall, I think I could have liked this film and there were smaller elements that I did enjoy, but I felt this film was rushed, repetitive, and played too much towards the taboos instead of breaking them. The obvious pitfalls of this film can be seen by the last scene of this film when we are privy to how the title of this film was conceived. Our characters were uneventful, our story was underdeveloped, and we could have used something memorable to make what was happening between Y and J into something more symbolic than sex. To me, Jang was trying too much to capture art house meets pornographic … and it failed miserably. This was not a film worth the time and effort that it took to make.

Grade: ** out of *****