Screenings index

Exhausted

Gogal

dir. Kim Gok / South Korea 2008 / 128’

subtitles: Polish and English

New Horizons International Competition A Lake, Burrowing, Dazzle, $e11.ou7! – Sell Out!, Exhausted, Face, Helen, Hunger, Iréne, Mock up on Mu, Ne change rien, Oxygen, Spyder, Twilight Dancing Section index

Cast

Jang Liu, Park Ji-Hwan, Oh Keun-Young

Film description

One critic called Exhausted a transgression horror. This film is visually sophisticated, made with a contaminated, grainy 8 mm plate. In the first film made by himself (previously, he had worked with his brother, Kim Sun), Kim Gok, previously involved mainly in political issues, focuses on the transgressive aspect of interpersonal relations. The film starts with a scene of a woman being 'captured' by a man and a never-ending, muddy, field close to a factory.The woman is an exploited prostitute, the man her custodian and pimp. The story, which develops in the somehow beautiful post-industrial space of mud, dirt and smoking factories, requires the viewer to modify their interpretation habits. The director achieved a harmony of forces and composition in the work which can hardly be assessed in simple moral or aesthetic categories. The strong scenes of pornography and extreme violence intertwined with the plot are an ironic question about consequences of constraint of the mind by bodily representations and about shifting marks of equation between beauty and disgust. At the same time, exploring boundaries of film as a means to liberation from primitive illusions and dichotomies, the director leads the narrative to an extreme and imminent exhaustion of the film form.

Agnieszka Zając