BREATHLESS (Korea, 2009)
Directed by: Lee Hwan & Yang Ik-June
Starring: Yang Ik-June, Jeong Man-Shik, Kim Gol-B

The year is still young, so this may be premature - after all, we haven't accounted for all comers from Europe or the United States - but as of now, we feel confident in proclaiming that Yang Ik-June's feature-length directorial debut BREATHLESS is the feel-good, family-friendly domestic violence movie of the year. Brutal, scabrous, and blackly comic, the film embraces you even as it's giving you a fat lip, not so much tugging at the heartstrings as yanking them with a vengeance until your guts are on the floor.

In the first two minutes, a woman gets hit in the face.  She's the first of many.  To watch this film, you'd think South Korea is a land made up of little more than women getting hit.  Small-time "debt collector" Sang-hoon (director-writer-star Yang) comes to the rescue of the damsel in distress, only to turn around and slap the girl himself, posing a single, sad question: "Why do you just take it?"  The question hangs in the air as we follow Sang-hoon through his daily routine of shaking down debtors and beating them to a pulp in front of their children; his after-hours activities consist of tense, awkward encounters with his estranged sister and her meek nephew Hyung-in, followed by nightly beatings of his enfeebled father, whose own brutal abuse terrorized their household and led to the death of Sang-hoon's mother.  Every day is exactly the same, until Sang-hoon meets schoolgirl Yeon-hee (the wonderful Kim Gol-Bi), whose relentless gutter argot is more than a match for his foul mouth.  Unbeknownst to him, Yeon-hee has her own demons to contend with at home: A lazily vicious brother who'd rather smack her around than look for work, and a senile father who flies into a rage when reminded that his wife is dead.  Spitting obscenities back and forth, pushing each other to the limit in a ritual dance, Sang-hoon and Yeon-hee become fast un-friends, and pretty soon, Sang-hoon is opening up and they're taking Hyung-in along on their days out, forming a twisted kind of family nucleus.  As the ragged bonds between abuser and abused grow tighter and murkier, a unique kind of connective tissue emerges from the collective hematomas and misogyny: Shared pain, and the violent, ingrained legacy of socioeconomic desperation.

South Korean star Yang Ik-June sold his house to finance BREATHLESS (its Korean title, DDONGPARI, is a slang term for "dung fly" - the ultimate outsider, looking in), working with friends and scrounging money where he could to tell a intimate story that's resonated viscerally with the Korean psyche, particularly in older generations where a history of daily domestic abuse was dismally commonplace.  His performance as Sang-hoon is nothing short of a revelation, sketching a riveting, can't-take-your-black-eyes-off-him graffiti portrait of a man who can only communicate through a rudimentary language of brute force.  In repose, Sang-hoon is slouched and lethargic, monosyllabic, regarding his bloodied knuckles every morning with a kind of bruised melancholy, but when he springs into action, he's like a bloodthirsty jack-in-the-box, coming alive in the only way he knows how.  Yet despite his learned behaviors, the hidden emotional core behind his misanthropic character gleams through the scars - for all the picture's violence and cruelty, Sang-hoon's bond with little Hyung-in is no less a tear-jerker than that of, say, the father and son in THE BICYCLE THIEF.  Like Sang-hoon, BREATHLESS has stalked the international festival circuit with the furious intensity of a debt collector from a broken home, grabbing top honors in its calloused paws wherever it goes; at the Rotterdam Film Festival, it picked up three prestigious Tiger Awards, a validation for Yang Ik-June, who has decried the censorship in South Korean cinema and fought for more gritty realism in his work.  "I want to say f--k you to the world with my films," Yang explained in local press.  But beneath the expletives, BREATHLESS is a richly-drawn, deeply-felt character piece, a meditation on violence and family.  Like its fearsome subject, it cares (and scares) with all of its black-and-blue heart.