Samaritan Girl
updated: September 3, 2008
South Korea 2004. D: Kim K-duk. Cast: Lee Uhi, Seo Min-jung. 95 min. Competition.
Kim Ki-duk’s meditation on sin and redemption, turmoil and peace, starts with two school-girls playing around the statues in a park, hugging teddy-bears, talking of saints and miracles, while trying to raise money for a trip to Europe; the money comes from the men who sleep with one of the girls, while the other arranges the meetings. There’s a radiant serenity about the little prostitute - it could be the glow of amorality, it could be something else, much richer and stranger - and the film seems to take its cue from her expression. It is visually beautiful with an air of autumn sadness and a soft rhythm which seems to envelop the emotional violence, and in the end to soothe it.
Scene by scene you don’t know where the director is leading you. When the police comes into the room in which she meets her customers, the girl jumps out of the window to her death (it doesn’t look like a desperate act: she smiles), and the film follows her friend as she goes after the customers, returning their money and also giving herself to them in atonement. Then it turns to the stricken father, sitting very still in his car after sighting his daughter with one of the men, dead leaves gathering on the windshield. There’s an extraordinary moment when he puts his hand on a boiling cauldron, as though he wanted to check what burns most, the fire or his anguish. He doesn’t say a word to his daughter, but he starts following her, scaring off the men she sees, and his quiet rage is genuinely frightening. The film has an alluringly secretive manner: the characters keep to themselves and Kim Ki-duk doesn’t explain too much - there’s no big let’s-have-it-all-out confrontation between father and daughter, no clearly stated moral position. It simply comes to rest somewhere in the countryside, where the father takes the daughter, teaches her to drive and leaves her on her own? And Kim Ki-duk leaves us with no conclusive answers.
Andrei Gorzo