Bittersweet Life, A

Writer-director Kim Ji-woon perfectly exemplifies the romantic fatalism that is central to the gangster mythos with an added serve of ruthless detachment and aestheticisation that is more distinctively Asian than is the case with European variants. Cultural comparisons aside, A Bittersweet Life is a stylishly tense revenge movie that is so snappily realized as to make its 2 hour running time fly by.

Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) is an enforcer for Mr Kang (Kim Young-Chul) a high-level crim who runs a flash hotel as a cover for his underworld activities. Assigned to watch Kang’s girlfriend, Hee-soo (Shin Min-a), Sun-woo catches her with her boyfriend but feeling the pangs of kindness, decides not to tell Kang. Meanwhile a rival gangster Baek (Hwang Jeong-min) has taken a dislike to Sun-woo and decided to take him down. Typically enough the film is built around a complex plot and the gimmick here is that the hoods use knives rather than guns (although, oddly, the first fight sequence has one of the gangsters with a gun) so that there is plenty of occasion for martial arts action before we arrive at the climactic gun battle. The action gets rather far-fetched in the second half with Sun-woo digging himself out of a live grave and escaping from a couple of dozen thugs even though his left hand has been allegedly smashed with a huge wrench. Still its all in the name of a particular kind of fun – that of seeing bads guys getting the bejeezus beaten out of them and in this respect A Bittersweet Life delivers.

Lee Byung-hun, who some might recognize from Joint Security Area (2000), the director of which, Park Chan-wook, is a master in the gangster revenge sub-genre, is tip-top in the lead role – good-looking and super-cool but with the right amount of supressed sensitivity, a humanizing quality that gets him into trouble in the first place, and which gives occasion for philosophically framing the action, an aspect which is central to lifting the film above standard martial arts fare. Equally important however is  Kim Ji-woon’s skilled direction and DOP Kim Ji-yong’s marvellous camera-work. The result may be too violent for some tastes but in its defence there are many more parts to the whole than this.

 

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