The 14th feature from Kim Ki-duk, better known in the West for his “extreme” psycho-sexual dramas, The Isle (2000) and Bad Guy (2002) is a remarkably restrained affair. The story centres on a love triangle between a disaffected housewife Yeon (Park Zi-a), her adulterous husband (Ha Jung-woo) and a death cell inmate, Jang Jin, played by Taiwanese star Chang Chen.
The film opens with Jin’s attempt to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the throat with a sharpened pen, an action which renders him “voiceless” and unable to communicate verbally. The action switches to Yeon who is watching a news report about his suicide attempt. Yeon immediately feels a connection with him, an intimate bond created through the presence of death or the absence of breath – hence the film’s title. Yeon’s childhood trauma of drowning and being unable to breathe is mirrored by Jin’s repeated attempts to kill himself by stabbing his throat and cutting off his airway. Yeon visits him in prison telling the guards that she is his ex-girlfriend. Although Yeon is turned away at first, she is subsequently allowed to visit Jang Jin and an intimate relationship develops. While the affair is compressed over a short period of time, Yeon reconfigures the temporality of the affair as each time she visits Jang, she decorates the visitors’ room with pictures and accoutrements of a different season starting with Spring and finishing with Winter and the consummation of the affair. Each visit begins with Yeon singing an appropriate seasonal song, and ends with her giving Jin a photograph of herself, from childhood, to her teenage years to middle age again signalling the importance of time and the passage of time as the main theme of Breath. The affair itself is orchestrated through the prison’s governor – a stand in for the director and played appropriately enough by Kim himself – who we “watch” watching the couple’s affair unfold on the security camera creating a meta-narrative on cinematic voyeurism and the fetishism of the gaze in film theory.
Jin’s affair with Yeon creates not only ructions with Yeon’s husband but also jealousy with the other inmates that he shares his bare cell with, creating a parallel between the two situations and the disparate spaces – prison/home – in which they take place. As the affair comes to its inevitable conclusion with Jin moving towards death as the date of his re-scheduled execution nears, Yeon moves towards life as signalled by her forgiveness of her husband’s extra-marital affair. Visually, this is demonstrated as the Yeon, her husband and their daughter play together in the snow outside, after her final visit, as Jin is deprived of breath by one of his fellow inmates who slowly chokes Jin to death. As such Breath asserts the primacy of life in the inevitable face of death.
This circular movement between the seasons, and the compression of time, marks Breath as an unofficial sequel to the award winning Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring (2003). Chang Chen delivers an impressive performance as the mute and tormented Jang Jin traumatized by the act of violence that led to his imprisonment, while Park Zi-a perfectly inhabits the role as the disaffected housewife whose journey from a desire for death to embracing life provides much of the emotional focus and depth of the film. For a director often accused of misygonism, Breath provides material evidence of Kim Ki-duk’s ability to produce female centred narratives and thereby contests such accusations. While undoubtedly Kim Ki-duk is one of contemporary cinema’s most interesting and innovative directors, he has never managed to gain either the critical or commercial success domestically that he has internationally. Perhaps the restrained narratives, use of silence and the sometimes uncomfortable themes of his films which show the darker underbelly of contemporary South Korea, do not gel with a nation of cinephiles who prefer big action blockbusters over art orientated cinema or critics who have expressed blatant dislike for Kim’s more extreme films. Yet as Breath clearly demonstrates, Kim should be recognized as one of South Korea’s most accomplished directors alongside auteur’s Park Chan-wook and Bong Jong-ho. Kim Ki-duk’s mature films have moved away from the extreme cinema of his early days to provide profound mediations of the nature of life and death. This is a film that demonstrates just how accomplished a director of Kim Ki-duk is, and one can only hope that it will pave the way for a wider appreciation of his films outside of their extreme origins.
