Time (2006) – DVD

Shi gan
****/**** Image B- Sound A Extras D
starring Sung Hyan-ah, Ha Jung-woo, Park Ji-Yeon
written and directed by Kim Ki-duk

by Walter Chaw Horror is the product of Kim Ki-duk's Time, the South Korean auteur's unbelievably unpleasant treatise on misogyny and objectification: the twin crosses he bears in the crucible of his own country's harshest criticism of him. To see it as the director's response to his detractors is simplistic, to be sure, and given that other filmmakers' marches to rhetorical cavalries (Todd Solondz's Storytelling, Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things) are so obviously band-aids applied to sucking chest wounds, it's not a flattering analysis, either. But Time is the species of rebuttal that functions as a prime example of the artist's essential concerns applied to what are perceived to be his essential blind spots. It's a Kim picture that clarifies other Kim pictures–a treatise on misogyny that is not in itself misogynistic. It's self-aware in a way that Kim's films haven't been so far, enough on point throughout that common charges of Kim's wandering attention span are difficult to levy. What elevates Hitchcock into the pantheon has more than a little to do with the fact that his masterpieces are consistently and mainly about his blind spots. You don't so much dissect Vertigo as Vertigo, with every year and every subsequent viewing, dissects you. Time isn't Vertigo, but it lives behind the same door in our collective, Jungian cellar. It tackles the big existential question of personal identity by concerning itself topically with the current plastic-surgery fad run amuck in South Korea. Peel back its surface to find an underneath writhing with a universal horror of temporariness and mortality.

Our Jimmy Stewart is Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo), who, in the middle of a lovemaking session, is unable to conceal that his sexual love for girlfriend Seh-hee (Park Ji-yeon) has evolved into companionate love. Inevitable? Probably. At least sexual anthropologist Don Symons would argue that the hardwiring of men dictates it to be so. Seh-hee does the sensible thing and encourages a little play-acting to lubricate the process before doing the insensible thing and disappearing under the knife to emerge, cosmetically reborn, as the variety of woman Ji-woo desires. Time mirrors most individuals in that it lumps common knowledge with an unnatural reaction to said knowledge: there's not a reasonable person on this green Earth who would deny that there's a sexual differentiation in our species, and yet there are a great many folks who wilfully resist any consideration of a fundamental gender difference in defining the parameters of their social philosophy. ("Double Standard" has a pejorative connotation it doesn't deserve.) So while Seh-hee (Sung Hyan-ah post-op) understands that her lover desires sexual variation, she rejects the notion that a comfortable, familiar relationship could be as rewarding as a lust-driven one–that sobriety is as intoxicating as inebriation. Thus the basis of Time is the hypocrisy festering at the root of all our sexual relationships. It suggests on the one hand that what men desire from women is natural–and on the other that the toll of "natural" on women is devastating when twisted into an industry founded on selling the first, hot hours of a relationship in nips and tucks.

A sequence where Ji-woo meets a woman in a coffee bar wearing a Seh-hee mask is one of the great freak-outs in recent memory. It marries in one surreal, astonishingly loaded image the winsome lovelorn with an identity crisis so intimate in its violation that it feels physical. Kim wordlessly couches the picture's tension between the innate and the learned–how we do our level best to deny what we know is unavoidable. Find in that a denial of our very mortality. Time is about something thornier than just a resistance to death (to "time," of course): it's deeply invested in this idea that death isn't so bad, it's the death of our ability to experience things again for the first time that's the real loss. It's about nostalgia, and it locates that feeling of impossible reclamation as the foundation for the many weird things we do to ourselves because we believe it will erase our emotional memories with the physical evidence of having survived them. Like David Cronenberg (by way of Hiroshi Teshigahara), his closest Western analog, Kim at his best is an alien anthropologist identifying humans as insects in man-clothing, slotted into rite and ritual like tin soldiers pre-programmed by millennia of evolutionary clockwork. Indeed, Time and Cronenberg's recent Eastern Promises are complementary pieces identical in their bleak take on the future of our antpile society, run as it is by insects that dream of being men and awaken at the moment of crisis.

THE DVD
Time comes home on DVD via Life Size Entertainment in a spotty, digitally-buggy 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that betrays some colour blooming and processing problems in Kim's swimmier camera motions. Given the director's blossoming reputation for his rapturous tableaux, well, let's just say it's a shame that a film so preoccupied with surface appearances is itself inherently flawed in this presentation. Almost all of Kim's other late films (I popped in 3-Iron for a quick comparison) have received more TLC on the format; I wonder whether the relative dismissal of the picture resulted in a commensurate lowering of standards. Thankfully, the original Korean track is mastered in a nice, if unspectacular, DD 5.1 bitstream that delivers the dialogue with sharp fidelity. The key bonus feature is a largely-unedited 45-minute chunk of behind-the-scenes footage wherein Kim interacts with his cast as they walk through and rehearse, on the fly, scenes and shots from the film. The temptation is to say that it's illuminating to watch the maestro at work, but closer to the truth is that it's boring to be on a movie set, and that sense of nothing much happening while lights are put in place and the director argues with his DP is offered intact for what it's worth. The theatrical trailer is also included–it rounds out the presentation.

Time comes home on DVD via Life Size Entertainment in a spotty, digitally-buggy 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that betrays some colour blooming and processing problems in Kim's swimmier camera motions. Given the director's blossoming reputation for his rapturous tableaux, well, let's just say it's a shame that a film so preoccupied with surface appearances is itself inherently flawed in this presentation. Almost all of Kim's other late films (I popped in 3-Iron for a quick comparison) have received more TLC on the format; I wonder whether the relative dismissal of the picture resulted in a commensurate lowering of standards. Thankfully, the original Korean track is mastered in a nice, if unspectacular, DD 5.1 bitstream that delivers the dialogue with sharp fidelity. The key bonus feature is a largely-unedited 45-minute chunk of behind-the-scenes footage wherein Kim interacts with his cast as they walk through and rehearse, on the fly, scenes and shots from the film. The temptation is to say that it's illuminating to watch the maestro at work, but closer to the truth is that it's boring to be on a movie set, and that sense of nothing much happening while lights are put in place and the director argues with his DP is offered intact for what it's worth. The theatrical trailer is also included–it rounds out the presentation. Originally published: March 25, 2008.

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