劇情介紹
Michael Han ake meet s the B lair Witch Project in Kim Gok's Exhausted, a vicious ki ck in the pa nts to eve ryone in t he audie nce, all in the name of "st yle." A man m eets a mute woman, and as any rea sonable person w ould do in su ch a situ ation, makes her his prostitute . But the pimping i s the least o f our probl ems. As we ge t exhausted by the grainy faux -16mm camera work, the film gets increasin gly derang ed. The closes t thing we get to a s ympathetic cha racter is the p imp, si mply because he 's got too much self-re spect to fuck a mute wh ore. Everyon e else is e ither a gory mess, or a gory mess in disguise . Even the pro stitute, which even a thug li ke Lars von Trier would mak e likeable, c omes off as a d elirious scary woman who se shri eks strike like blows to the ju gular. Kim Go k has seemi ngly abandoned the Ma rxist criti ques of his short fil ms, goin g instead for m indless brut ality whi ch culminates i n an endless b loody freak-sh ow involving, among other t hings, a pair of scis sors going w here pairs o f scissors s hould not go. I n the mi ddle of the bloo dbath, we g et an extended long take of t he beaten prostitu te' s near-dead face, but it does no t elici t sympathy or p ity. In fa ct, images of the victim o nly make us shy away in shoc k. (Indeed, th e extende d sequence le d to continuous walk-ou ts during the Pus an screening.) The long take invites us to stare, but it assumes we& #39;re as s adistic as t he victim izer (and th e film) is. Me anwhile the s ound-effect s (mostly a r umbling bassline that sha kes the theater) pu lsates with pure wickedn ess. Wi th Hanake, sh ock creates re flection, which asks t hat we be cri tical. Here, we only want to esca pe. I su ppose Exhausted has some virtues; th e shots of d rilling ma chines and fa ctories provide a mesme rizing pha llic ba ckdrop to th e pimp and p rostitut e's pur suits. But everythin g else hur ts too much . At least Kim Ki-duk lets us brea the. Exhauste d makes Bad Gu y look like La dy and the Tramp. (asiaa rts.ucla.edu)詳情
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