Korean Restif de la Bretonne?

jakob13

The films of Korean director Kim Ki-duk are never easy. A student of French cinema, he has won Best Director awards at Berlin, Venice and Cannes. He is known for sparse dialogue or none at all. He, therefore, forces the film-goer to exercise her imagination to connect the dots and form leaps of imaginative fancy of things that are not verbally explicit, but also challenges an inner impediment to memory As such, his audience, voyeuristically, becomes an accomplice in the commission of his cinematic flights of fancy.

There is no better example of this assertion than his 19th film Möbius (2013), which even now has been banned in Kim's native South Korea.

The film's title refers to a continuous tale of a single thread that turns on its self thereby joining the other end as though it were a uniform narrative, which it is.

Möbius is a fictionalized and sexually explicit treatment of castration, a capacious idea that Freud says haunts men: the loss of their manhood, sexual power and domination. And, yes, envy.

Kim immediately brings us into a world that borders on eroticism of the antisocial that not only pays excessive attention to mutilation, carnal desires, rape as well as pumice stones that becomes necessary for neutered men's sexual gratification.

Kim's hand-held camera will examine, for artistic purpose, gang rape, sadomasochism as it obtains to sexual relations between a eunuch and a woman, as he peels away the layers of a dysfunctional family and by extension the psychic underbelly of his own society.

Straightaway, Möbius does not spare us the torture that drives the film to its final conclusion.

Disassociated from reality, a mad, neglected middle-class housewife (Lee Eun-woo), driven to excessive drinking, by a promiscuous husband (Jo Jae-hyon) boldly and with determination carries out her revenge. Failing in her attempt to cut off her husband's testicle turns on her teenage son (Seo Young-ju) that she, in a Medea-like moment of folly, like Medea, slices off his penis, to take vengeance on her husband.

And all this without spoken dialogue, that reflects learned helplessness of an unbearable situation, yet draws us into a vortex of pain and emotional array of angst, disgust or erotic voyeurism.

As husband and wife struggle over the mutilated penis, she, in a paroxysm of rage, swallows it and then flees into the night.

The father does what he can for his severely damaged son, but cannot spare him the humiliation he faces at school or joining the gang that rapes his father's mistress.

Meanwhile, feeling the heavy weight of guilt, the father surfs the Internet for ways that will not deny his son the attenuated pleasures of the flesh, thus the recourse to pumice stones for sexual arousal. Yet the wages of guilt haunt the man that he has his own sex surgically removed for the day when he finds online a transplant procedure that will make his son a whole man again.

In the intervening time, the mistress initiates the son into a sort of sexual excitement and fulfillment through S&M. More, they plot her revenge on the gang leader who brutally raped her, by castrating him.

If this sounds distasteful, elements of Möbius can be found in films such as the black comedy The War of the Roses or sexual fulfillment without coitus in Coming Home. Have we so quickly forgotten the abused Lorena Bobbitt who cut off her husband's penis? Now restored to manhood, the son discovers that he cannot get an erection. And at that moment, his mother returns, to find a eunuch for a husband, who, despite his infirmity, tries to rape her. She seeks the bed of her son, who physically responds to her caresses, as though his "new" penis had memory of his father's bed play with his mother.

And so like the Möbius band, the story comes full circle, as the theme of incest is introduced.

The wife is shot dead by her husband; he, in turn, commits suicide. As this happens, the son experiences in sleep Onanist pleasure. Finding the bodies of his parents, he takes the gun from his father's hand and shots himself in the groin, as punishment for the tragedy that a penis has brought his mum to madness, his father to folly and he to no future.

Few filmmakers are foolhardy to bring Möbius to the screen and to show it hors competition at Venice's La Mostra. And yet, Kim, unsubtle as this film is, ends it on a compassionate tone: for the son now has become a Buddhist monk seeking to end his suffering, his karma, by undertaking good deeds in order to escape the vicissitudes of his past life in the hope of attaining Nirvana. Another interesting point is the expression of love and sacrifice that the father has for his son.

Heavy handed and taboo in theme, Möbius has faced censorship and very limited runs. It lacks the artistic quality of Oshima Nagisa's In the realm of the senses, which treats a similar theme with cinematic craft and emotional maturity and high art.

.

score 8/10

jakob13 11 November 2014

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3121781/