La Belle (2000) – AKA 미인
A mentally unhinged masochist girl addicted to an abusive boyfriend, A simp who's in love with her, A beautiful minimal apartment, Great sex, Amazing background score.
A nude model moves into a lonely writer’s white apartment; her body stays with him, while her heart keeps answering another man’s phone calls.
A magazine writer first notices the unnamed woman crying over a lover who treats her like an afterthought. When she later turns up as the nude model he is meant to interview, curiosity becomes attraction, attraction becomes rescue, and rescue soon becomes the sort of bad romantic decision that keeps a film critic pleasantly nervous. He finds her soaked, drunk and abandoned outside a karaoke bar, takes her home, warms her up and allows her to settle into his stark apartment as if she has always lived there. They eat, sleep, quarrel and have a great deal of sex, but domestic bliss never really arrives. Whenever her mobile rings, she dresses in a frantic rush and runs back to the former lover she cannot shake, leaving the writer to wait in silence. She returns intoxicated, humiliated or bruised, and he repeatedly tends to her before their...
frustration spills back into bed. The ugly joke is that both are addicted to someone who cannot love them properly: she chases an abusive man, while the writer clings to a woman who gives him her naked body but reserves her longing for somebody else. His work begins to disappear beneath jealousy, self-loathing and increasingly possessive fantasies; when her other relationship pushes its violence into their home, his quiet devotion starts curdling into something much more dangerous. A brief escape to the coast offers them a glimpse of the easy, playful couple they might have been, but by then the emotional trap has already closed. Director Yeo Kyun-dong, adapting his own novel Body, shoots the affair less like a conventional romance than a chilly visual diary told from the man’s wounded point of view. His monologues, imagined moments and surreal slips between desire and reality make it unclear whether we are seeing the woman herself or the compliant lover he wishes she could become. The nearly empty white rooms, long silences, spare piano score and carefully choreographed bodies give the film an elegant, melancholy pull. At times it is hypnotic; at others, the thin dialogue and inexperienced performances make it feel like an expensive perfume commercial that has forgotten what it is selling. Still, beneath all the bare flesh is a genuinely sour idea: sex can comfort two lonely people for a night, but it cannot force affection, cure obsession or make an unavailable heart come home.
This is turn-of-the-millennium South Korea in all its cool urban isolation: magazine assignments, ringing mobile phones, karaoke bars and emotionally stranded young adults hiding inside minimalist interiors. Much of the picture was filmed in photographer Kim Yong-ho’s home, whose clean lines and broad white spaces become a beautiful little prison, while the scenes at Mangsang Beach bring in cold sea air and temporary freedom. The vibe is slow, hushed and sensuous rather than playful—part erotic chamber drama, part doomed-love fever dream, with a faint Wong Kar-wai sadness and a darker Betty Blue streak.
Lee Ji-hyun is the obvious reason many viewers found the patience to enter that white apartment. Tall, long-legged and strikingly feminine, she appears vulnerable one moment and sexually fearless the next, playing the woman as a restless mix of wounded child, elusive mistress and self-destructive siren. Her dialogue delivery can be raw and uneven, but her physical commitment is absolute, and the film adores every curve, movement and sleepy expression. The sex is frequent, prolonged and simulated, with abundant breast and rear nudity, intimate embraces and bodies photographed without much coyness, though it stops short of explicit genital detail. It is softcore in exposure, arthouse in presentation and emotionally far less comfortable than its beautiful naked leads initially suggest.
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