Students of cinema Sam gang yi is a masterpiece! Sam gang yi (Three...Extremes) is a three part collaboration by directors/writers Chan-wook Park, Takashi Miike and Fruit Chan. The three segments "Dumplings", "Cut", and "The Box" involve three different stories of individuals that find themselves in situations that develop into nightmares. For the purposes of the blog i will focus on the segment by the director Chan Wook Park, titled "Cut".
("Cut" is played by actor Byung-hun Lee whose picture is on the left)
The segment is about a director who seemingly has the perfect life, wealth, fame, a beautiful wife, and a prospering career. One evening this director goes home after a successful day of filming a vampire film and is attacked by an intruder whom he has presumably never seen before. After being incapacitated the director wakes up to find himself on the very same film set he has just come home from which happens to be the same exact design as his house. He is bound with an elastic band that extends beyond the set and his beautiful wife is sitting at a piano strung up like a puppet. At this point the story begins to unfold as the intruder introduces himself and shares with the director his plan and reasoning for their current dilemma. The intruder happens to have been an extra in each of the director's films! The reasoning for their current dilemma is that the director is too good of a man!
This all seems very confusing until we begin to look deeper into the intruders reasoning. The director has everything that the extra does not have, good looks, wealth, beautiful wife, success; with all these things it is unfair for the director to also possess "goodness". Evil must reside somewhere in him, this is what the intruder wants to find. Through out the rest of the segment the intruder devises a challenge in order to uncover the director's dark side. The challenge is... kill an innocent child or watch all of his wife's fingers be cut off one by one, leaving her unable to do the one thing she loves, play piano.
Park cleverly makes use of color and camera schemes and juxtaposition to make some very distinct points in this segment. The juxtaposition of the intruder and the director, the good the bad, the implied and the obvious are interwoven in the story to recall seemingly unimportant details that in the end are crucial to understanding the segment. In the main character's film there are several scenes which are recalled as the story progresses, such as the use of a similar instrument, or the positioning of a certain character. This effect gives the viewer a triple layered effect of theater within theater within theater, through this the use of layering and repetition the viewer is forced to look into the narrative that is occurring to peel away the meaning.
Toward the end of the story the intruder is now directing a masterpiece of his own, he has placed the director in a position which forces him to be honest. At this point the director indulges the intruder and confesses his infidelity with one of the actresses that he has directed. He explains that he does not even really care for his wife, and is more in love with this other girl and has been for some time. This should please the intruder but, he is not satiated. The drama plays out as the intruder explains in detail how he has just strangled his wife , and would have killed his son too but he couldn't follow through. As the segment reaches it's climactic ending, the main character attempts to kill the innocent child in order to save his wife and marriage when he learns that the innocent child is indeed the intruder's son.
In the following sequence of events, the intruder gets tangled in the wires suspending the beautiful wife and is killed by the her as she bites into his neck and sucks his blood. The director stares in horror as this happens, meanwhile the son of the intruder awakens and vows revenge. Frankly at this point i was confused as to what actually happens, because in a twist of events, the director becomes disoriented and attacks his wife. As he approaches her, he addresses her as though he is talking to the child, explaining why he has to kill him in order to preserve his marriage. The segment ends with the director strangling his own wife, the camera swirling is around him, and the child is sitting tied up on the couch staring at the scene angrily.
The viewer for a moment is left puzzled and possibly frustrated by this ending, but the satisfaction comes from knowing that there is a meaning to everything in the segment. Every sound, camera angle, prop, dialogue, and narrative background is used to connect the story of irony and revenge. Overall, the segment is masterfully crafted and directed, although it may not be satisfying to the typical Western audience it is absolutely a technically and artfully sound cinematic work.
No comments:
Post a Comment