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| From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/Killer_Butterfly.jpg |
Dir. Kim Ki-young
After being tricked into a
suicide pact with poisoned juice by a female stranger, a male college student enters
a suicidal depression of his own despite surviving, but many things get in his
way of a literal closure. The first an old man who refuses to die even when
burned alive. The second a two thousand year old woman. The third, the key
narrative, a history professor whose specimens of of Mongolian descent may be
provided to him from fresh victims, and his daughter who has connections to the
suicidal woman in the beginning. Kim
Ki-young has been growing in stature, slowly, within the last few years. In
the right areas you may know of The
Housemaid (1960), his most well known and completely available film so far,
and may have actually watched it for free thanks to cinema preservation and Martin Scorsese. The existence of a
remake also from Korea also helps, but Ki-young
beat the remake bandwagon by reimagining the movie in at least a few more re-adaptations.
I can also say proudly, while a DVD release of this would be great, that this
review is possible because the Korean
Film Archive have placed films like this, difficult to see, legally on YouTube with English subtitles for
anyone to watch. It's wonderful, considering the sorry state of availability of
many films still, that a cinematic organisation is making a canon of South
Korean film history available, all there for me and others to pick through when
we find it, and including stuff like Killer
Butterfly next to the arthouse dramas.  |
| From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3LHL6RAV1xQ/UE0ePUfeNcI/ AAAAAAAAFfk/DZBWX25Rnms/s1600/Killer%2BButterfly%2B23.jpg |
Ki-young's film isn't exactly conventional genre fare though. With
the growing amount of idiosyncratic, unconventional films making themselves stand
out for this year's Halloween 31 For 31,
against disappointing, bland or even unfinished movies, Killer Butterfly is just as different. In another's hands this
would be a melodramatic mess which drops plotlines all over the place, but with
Ki-young, it's both an immensely
engaging journey but also all connects together into the central themes. The
male student is forced into what is revealed, in an ending just as
out-of-the-blue as The Housemaid but
set up clearly, to be a crisis in his existence, debating if life is worth it
at all. Three things stop him. The first is where one's will, the old man's,
refuses to die and refuses to leave him alone. The second, including human
livers and sex surrounded by increasingly created pastries (?!), is the
potential for life or sacrificial death that he squanders because of either the
moral cost or his own life that it would involve. This pulls him into the
third, especially the daughter, where he is pushed away from how he wants to
snuff his life out, or actually, how he wants to live.
To achieve this, Ki-young has no issues with using genre
tropes with heavy aesthetics. Bright coloured lighting and coloured gels, and
distinct decor designs for interior scenes all create a distinct, hyperactive
tone for a film which knowingly gets ridiculous in tone. It's very much in
touch with lurid b-movie horror and thriller films, but like immensely
auteurist works created with one's own determination, it feels like you are
swimming through the creator's id. Gender divide and conflict are very much an
issue for the director, especially when it gets to the third part, as are
sexuality, and the clear themes of death and one's existence. The fact that the
three parts do connect together, in the tone of a complete fever dream, is a success
for Ki-young being able to make such
a tonally bizarre film work on a simplistic level when you understand the
wavelength he is on. Once you do, is also becomes apparent that our protagonist
is far from likable while yet still understandable decades later now - a
miserable, selfish youth who only cares about offing himself, yet aimless in
his existence and alone in poverty, eating the same noodles day-in-and-day-out,
he understandably suffers from a lack of any progression in his life that can
only be shocked out of him when he sees the absurdity and weirdness that death
can involve. Even the Professor and his daughter are trapped in themselves, the
former through his obsession with historical ethnography of his ancestors,
which could make him an accidental accomplice to murder and corpse desecration,
and the later by a pact and the fragility of the body that makes this pact grow
to an impossible place to abandon. The absurd push in the ending, like The Housemaid's, feels like Ki-young wanted to viewer not to walk
out of the cinema with a clear cut conclusion that would close the idea and
make them able to ignore it. When the protagonist gets a new lease on life, so
should we think about it while admiring such demented imagery the film has. Heady
stuff indeed, but to Killer Butterfly's
credit, mixing these ideas with lurid genre tropes makes the ideas more
significant. Instead of cased in petrifying drama, the oddity of it gets stuck
in your mind, and gives the late Ki-young
more potent messages, his will like that of the old man still managing to
survive through them and the most ridiculously awesome use of a model skeleton
you could find in cinema.
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