THE ISLE (2000)
Directed by: Kim Ki-Duk
Starring: Cho Jae-Hyun, Suh Jung, Park Seong-Hee, Jang Hang-Seon
Winner, Suh Jung for Best Actress, Oporto International Film Festival (Portugal)
Winner, Grand Prize, 19th Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Films
Winner, Special Jury Prize, International Film Festival of Moscow
Official Selection, 2000 Venice Biennial
Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival 2000
Sometime in the 1980's the arthouse flick and the exploitation movie got a divorce. Horror movies became video store filler and arthouse movies became withered coffee table books for the middlebrow set. Now there are separate sections in the video store for horror and foreign/art films, but there was a time in the ‘60s and ‘70s when the two were intertwined: Repulsion, I Am Curious…Yellow, Eraserhead, El Topo, The Night Porter - these movies filled midnight slots and grindhouse theatres. The highbrow angst, the nudity, the mutilation and existential dread were a heady brew, and they prospered until the conservative ‘80s when art, adult, skin, sex and blood were all forced to go into separate rooms and stand in the corner.
A few movies from Asia have harked back to this trend (Sex and Zen, Lies) but no other movie feels more like an escapee from this tradition, trapped in ice and thawed out unharmed in 2000 where it's learned our culture, taught itself to speak, and stands proudly as the ultimate, fabulous throwback, The Isle.
An arthouse horror flick in the tradition of Repulsion this ode to female resilience is all about silence, repression, and fish hooks jammed into delicate membranes. A scandal upon its release in Korea, it's either an earthy, feminist manifesto, or a woman-hating screed. It’s a sick and loopy love song painted in various shades of dominance and submission, mapping out a new atlas of relationships as hostage situations, or it’s a parody of rom com conventions where a self-sacrificing heroine does anything within her power to hang onto her man. Suh Jung (the female lead) is either a powerful, self-actualized woman or a two-dimensional, misogynist joke. It’s a love story, it’s an art film, it’s a horror movie, it’s a satire, it’s a date movie for sickos, a headtrip for freaks, a bloody car wreck you can’t tear your eyes away from.
A fugitive (is he an ex-cop who killed his lover, or a garden-variety thug on the run from a murder?) arrives at a fishing motel, a series of small huts floating on an isolated lake. Managed by a woman who refuses to speak and who sells beer, nightcrawlers, and her body to the vacationing fishermen it’s a beautifully unearthly locale blessed with awe-inducing early-morning light. Director Kim Ki-Duk (trained in Paris as a painter) shoots the entire movie as an ode to this ravishing location. When the sun goes down, things get freaky as the quiet manageress dog paddles around, terrorizing her guests, until she falls for our suicidal fugitive and starts exclusively terrorizing him.
In Korea, the movie was widely reviled upon its release, but has gone on to become an international succès de scandale scooping up awards at film festivals, and shocking journalists and audiences alike. Walkouts, faintings, praise, and pans have accompanied it everywhere it’s played. A resurrection of the arthouse horror film, full of sex, blood, mutilation, relationship power plays, nudity and parody this is the kind of movie that blows the dust off the art film genre as Suh Jung teaches her lover that the sharp pain in his leg isn’t an icepick — it’s love.