by Sukjong Hong


Subway Cinema's New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF)

Violence - state violence, police violence – was already on my mind when I went to watch “Breathless,” a film from first-time feature director Yang Ik-June that screened at the New York Asian Film Festival. Just that morning, I had gotten an email from a young documentary filmmaker in South Korea, in which she wrote, “Everyday the tension here feels like we’re walking at the tip of a knife.” For her, the Korean government’s clampdown on freedom of expression and on progressive media greatly intensified the sense of social crisis. In fact, after I watched Breathless, I read that director-writer-star Yang himself struggled with what so many independent filmmakers have long seen as a form of censorship - the ratings system, which rated his film for those 19 years old and up.

“Breathless" did in fact knock the breath out of me in its unrelenting depiction of violence. After all, the main character, Sang-hoon (played by Yang himself), is a “debt-collector” of the high-interest, high-brutality variety, who returns payments to his gang boss with blood on his knuckles. Beginning in the dawn hours, trailed by young apprentices who startle at his every move, he trawls the steep neighborhoods or dal-dongnae of the urban poor to extort payments. As he opens the door, out of the corner of the screen, as if out the corner of our eyes, we see his fist coming, the boots rising. By the time we see it, it is too late. Neither Sang-hoon nor his trainees are satisfied after just one kick. One kick always leads to another, and another, building to a reckless frenzy that pushes his victims to the brink of death. But these are also “victims,” who, only moments before, are seen pummeling their wives in front of their screaming children.

From the beginning, the movie makes it clear: there is no hero. Sang-hoon is not the cliché of the tough gangster who harbors a secret soft spot for the elderly, children, a long-lost love. He routinely curses at his boss, a childhood friend. He beats up his younger gang associates on the job. He throttles his own father. He yells at his half-sister for inviting him to dinner. He pummels strangers and slaps their weeping girlfriends. He does not seem to discriminate between innocents and villains, friends and enemies.

At the same time, in jagged flashbacks triggered by his line of work, the film reveals Sang-hoon barely surviving childhood domestic violence at the hands of his father, a man whose brutality leaves everyone else in the family but Sang-hoon and his father dead. It becomes clear that people do die - not at the hand of gangsters- but at the hands of fathers and husbands, behind closed doors. For Sang-hoon, then, it seems that this childhood trauma is set on “repeat,” as he beats student activists by day and thrashes his father by night. The barrenness of his life unwinds in the off hours with him losing his money in gambling parlors and furtively dropping off earnings for his elementary-school-aged nephew, who mutely watches him come and go. It is a stupefying cycle to watch.

One day, as usual, Sang-hoon slaps a stranger. But she, unlike everyone else, refuses to take it. This is high school senior, Han Yeon-hee, played by actress Kim Kkot-bi. She is not a likely heroine either. In fact, it is Yeon-hee who administers the first slap. She matches Sang-hoon’s foul language with her own stream of curses, from the beginning addressing this man more than fifteen years her senior as if he is beneath her (I could hear the Korean-speaking audience gasping when she first opened her mouth). Despite their disdainful interactions – “Why am I hanging out with an (expletive) uneducated thug?” she asks herself aloud, in front of him, as he counters, “What the (expletive) am I doing hanging out with an (expletive) high school (expletive) kid?” - they form an uneasy alliance, at first built on little more than her blackmailing beers from him.

Soon enough, it becomes clear that Yeon-hee does not have many options besides Sang-hoon. She, also motherless, is barely eking out an existence through an endless cycle of domestic violence herself, suffering daily assaults from her unemployed brother as well as from her father, a mentally disturbed Vietnam veteran who accuses Yeon-hee, trying to scrape together meals on his veteran’s compensation, of trying to poison him.

Somewhere between the beatings and threats, Sang-hoon and Yeon-hee connect. Their relationship blooms, but not through the norms of intimacy. They do not share revelations or even the most basic facts about themselves. Their relationship speaks of everything else in their lives – begrudging tenderness and trust, cloaked in showers of curse words and slaps to the head. Happiness, when it happens for them, is delirious and momentary, and the camera accordingly tilts and blurs along with them. Those moments, all together, are not much more than a few precious afternoons of wandering the open markets together with Sang-hoon’s nephew. After one especially trying day, when both have emerged from harrowing experiences, Sang-hoon and Yeon-hee meet. But instead of telling the other what they each experienced, they wordlessly share and withhold their trauma, in one of the most moving scenes in the film.

“Breathless” asks the audience to do two things at once- witness scene after scene of brutal violence enacted by and upon the main characters, and at the same time, contemplate the slim possibility of their breaking that cycle of violence – of domestic, class and even state violence. However, it is also suffocatingly clear that some kinds of violence do not simply go away, such as for Yeon-hee’s father, who is crippled in both mind and body by his deployment in the Vietnam War.

It may be agonizing for the viewer to see so much spit and pain and blood. However, the film continually locates the humor and lightness within Sang-hoon and Yeon-hee’s lives, from the sullen joy they find in their interactions to the conditions they carve out elsewhere in their routines.

Moreover, the film does not glorify the violence as so many films do - there is no slow-motion splitting of skin and bone, no artfully arranged corpses. The unquestionable horror and tragedy of such violence is clear up until the finale, which reveals that change, if it happens, is tenuous and fragile. No one is immune after all.

Finally, it is also interesting to consider the meaning of the Korean-language title of the film, which is 똥파리 (“Ddong-pari”) or dung-fly. The word colloquially refers to social pariahs, to the type of people one doesn’t want around them – including a petty gangster like Sang-hoon or a truant high school student like Yeon-hee. It seems an obvious truth that social outcasts, despite their similar status, are never meant to get along with each other, as these two characters inexplicably do. Beyond their story, the so-called dung-flies of society populate the social world of the film- the urban poor, street vendors, and small-scale entrepreneurs in the informal economy of private loans and extortion. When Sang-hoon barges in on men beating their families, more often than not these scenes take place against a backdrop of squalid rooms with peeling wallpaper, piled high with boxes instead of furniture, walls barely patched together with construction scraps. You wonder, as the gangsters knock on doors, how can they collect payments from people who have nothing? Yet the person that comes across as the most heartless figure in the film is not from the dung-fly world, but rather, Yeon-hee’s schoolteacher, who treats the high school student so coldly it is hard to watch. She doesn’t even have to lift a finger.

The director Yang Ik-June apparently wanted to show “raw” filmmaking, from the aesthetic style of the film to the way it depicted its topic. In this, he succeeds for the most part. There is no final consolation in “Breathless.” Yes, his characters may move on after extreme violence, but such scenes are interwoven with reminders that show the loss that may still accompany the happiness gained. For me, this kind of ambiguity pushes audience members back out into the world, to consider how difficult it is, in reality, to break out of a pattern of violence and heal from it, whether from domestic violence or from the violence institutionalized in class and state structures. Knowing that Yang himself was exploring personal childhood experience through this film is well-reflected in the complexity of its message and its celebration of paradoxes and extremes.

About Nodutdol eNews

Nodutdol eNews is the monthly e-mail newsletter of Nodutdol.Through grassroots organization and community development, Nodutdol seeks to bridge divisions created by war, nation, gender, sexual orientation, language, classes and generation among Koreans and to empower our community to address the injustice we and other people of color face here and abroad. Nodutdol works in collaboration with other progressive organizations locally, nationally and internationally as part of a larger movement for peace and social change.

View the complete archives of Nodutdol eNews »