After years of being underappreciated in his home country, Kim Ki-duk finally gained international attention for his controversial, stirring art-house piece, The Isle, on the film festival circuit. Though the stories of vomiting and fainting viewers were responsible for some of the attention, his breakthrough film is a solid idiosyncratic love story, sweet in its cruelty, complex in its simplicity and magical in its realism.
Suh Jung—with a mix of fiery Hera-like gazes and quiet vulnerability— plays a mute woman, Hee-jin, who runs a resort along a lake in the Korean wilderness, in which customers rent out small one room houses floating a short boat ride away from the shore. She follows a daily routine, traveling between the houses occasionally, selling bait, food or her body to the fishermen until she meets the quiet Hyun-shik, running away from his past, and she takes a liking to him.
The two never speak to each other, but their turbulent relationship carries a film that contains its fair share of narrative flaws. A love triangle emerges when Hyun-shik meets and befriends a prostitute, igniting Hee-jin’s jealousy and what follows is a soon-vicious power struggle between the two, further escalated by Hee-jin’s business structure. She is the only one with a boat and this lake resort becomes her castle as she exercises full control over the drifting homes and takes advantage of it, acting on her own whim.
But Kim, along with Suh Jung make sure the audience is on her side, crafting Hee-jin into an endearing misunderstood outcast with motivations that seem perfectly understandable to us. It is touching when she finds a kindred spirit in Hyun-shik and love somehow manages to blossom over rape and suicide attempts—we want them to live a sweet, silent life together in a little house on the water. Yet with Kim, unfortunate accidents are a frequent complication for his characters and the circumstances are distressing on a simple and visceral level.
The Isle marks Kim’s first truly satisfying film and deserves the acclaim it receives as the definitive film of the first half of his career. Kim retains his dark, gritty undertones, but he finally addresses them from unique angles, using a hazy lake setting and odd bits of humor. His character drama is strengthened by the novel approach full of symbols, and while the writing requires occasional moments of disbelief—in one scene Kim ignores silly human limitations of lung capacity—it is no less powerful, especially as a striking introduction to the auteur’s career.
Reviewed by Tarun
