I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK

Cha Young-goon thinks she's a cyborg. She works in a factory, where the employees all wear bright red and sit in neat, identical rows. One day, she slits her wrist and inserts an electrical cable into the wound in an attempt to recharge herself. Unsurprisingly, she is committed to a mental hospital.

The hospital is coloured in a similar stylistic vein, with lovely pastel shades of primary colours. It's all very different from writer/director's Park Chan-wook's previous films; his bleak Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance fades into black and white half way through the film. I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK is definitely a radical departure, although it does retain Park's visual quirkiness.

Young-goon has Cher-like hair, and wide, innocent eyes; we instantly fall in love with her. Once committed, she begins talking to vending machines and strip lights, using her grandmother's dentures. She also refuses to eat, preferring instead to lick batteries. This attracts the attention of mask-wearing Park Il-sun, fellow patient and kleptomaniac. But Il-sun is not your average, run-of-the-mill pickpocket; he steals the intangible, such as memories, table tennis skill, or politeness.

It is not long before Young-goon enlists Il-sun to steal her sympathy. You see, Young-goon needs to rescue her grandmother, who has also been committed, and kill the doctors holding her prisoner. But she can't stop worrying that her victims have grandmothers of their own. And, as we all know, sympathy is one of the seven deadly robotic sins. (The others include thankfulness, hesitation, and useless daydreaming.) It's all very strange. Refreshingly strange, in fact. Two odd highlights are a yodelling interlude, and an extended Peckinpah-style bloodbath, complete with finger guns. The unusual plot and set pieces are complemented by an equally unusual look. Park's idiosyncratic visual flair translates well from the darkness and violence of his vengeance trilogy, to the lighter world of this romantic comedy. The mental hospital looks like no hospital I've ever seen, with bright green padded rooms, deep red maintenance corridors, and even a hiccupping grandfather clock. The CGI, whether due to budget constraints or artistic choice, has that artificial quality seen all too often, but here it adds to the films carefully crafted aesthetic. It's almost as if we're seeing the hospital through the eyes of the patients; everything seems not quite real. Or perhaps too real.

There is a shaky start, though. Throughout the first half of the film, as we are amused by Young-goon's robotic shenanigans, we are also distanced from her. I'm a Cyborg's charming eccentricities threaten to overwhelm the proceedings, bury the characters in their own strangeness. Thankfully, the really quite genuine relationship between Young-goon and Il-sun injects some much needed humanity, and as the film progresses, we begin to learn more of, and sympathise with, Young-goon's plight.

I'm a Cyborg is one of those rare and welcome films that you cannot help but smile through. Young-goon's innocent eyes, the hospital's pastel-coloured walls, the glorious flights of fancy; it all makes for one of the most charming, and definitely the oddest, romantic comedy I have seen in a long time. Odd in the good way, though.

I have to say, I really don't see where all the dislike and criticisms come from. Granted, Cyborg is a far different film from all of Park's other works, and especially in the world of romantic comedies falls into the really freaking weird category, but I found it to be really entertaining. It was very sweet, but in a good way. No excessive cuteness, no magical cure to being crazy. The crazy people are crazy, and that ain't gonna change anytime soon. The cinematography and visuals were great. I really loved the set design of the hospital. And all of the side characters were a great cast of crazies. I have not watched a great deal of Korean cinema, and have never seen the leads in anything before. I live in Korea, so I'm very aware of Rain (or Be, as its pronounced here), but I thought that both pulled off their rolls very well, especially the girl. If you are looking for something fun, light hearted and a little bizarre, check this out. Just know that it is not your normal Park Chan Wook film.

Have you ever had an out of the body experience? Or a waking dream? One minute you're asleep, having this fantastic dream. Maybe you have to fly across buildings or solve a problem or any weird stuff in this dream. Then you're almost awake, but not quite. You hang on to the dream, not wanting to wake up. Don't you hate it when someone tries to rush you? Hey! Wake up! No - go away - I wanna finish my dream!

I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK reminds you of so many different movies in the first ten minutes. You try to fit it into a box. Hey! It's like so-and-so! But it's not. The vision that director Chan-wook Park presents us with is foreign, so alien to any genre, that our mind is confused. Maybe you have to give up all expectation before you can enjoy it.

Young-goon thinks she is a cyborg. A nice, normal young girl otherwise, that is her only kink. Hello mental institution. She can't eat of course - food makes her ill (really) so she licks batteries of various sorts as other inmates tuck into their dinner. She's lonely, and talks to machines. The drinks dispenser is one of her favourites. But she's not a psycho - as she will point out - "I'm not a psycho: I'm a cyborg."

As inmates go, Young-goon is fairly low maintenance. Most of the anti-social patients are weird beyond belief. But it is a young man called Il-soon who manages to reach out to her where doctors have failed. Il-soon believes all sorts of things - like believing he has the power to steal intangibles from people, such as character, attitudes or habits. His services are soon in demand among the other patients.

Young-goon has some internal conflicts. For cyborgs, there are seven deadly sins, and they give her some problems. The seven deadly sins for a cyborg are:

Sympathy. Sadness. Restlessness. Hesitating. Useless day-dreaming. Feeling guilty. Thankfulness.

Of all these sins, sympathy is the worst.

Interestingly, the inmates are like parts of the body: they compensate for each other's particular shortcomings and have very sane insights into kinds of madness not their own.

When the film becomes a love story, it is not one based on lust and idiocy. The funny farm becomes a parable for a world in which we need to believe in and accept each other's failings. Chan-wook Park has crafted perhaps the most original film of the year and one of the most moving. It comments on the nature of belief, and on a humanity that we are in danger of losing through cleverness. It features colourful characters and scenes that make us gasp. There is enough creativity in I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK for ten films, not just one. Constantly defying expectation, it even manages to treat with respect the question of mental illness (which is used largely as a metaphor or plot device). When we see the pain and suffering of real mental illness, it is clear that Chan-wook Park is not mocking.

I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK takes Chan-wook Park's reputation as a master filmmaker and builds it even further. Having established himself with films of violent realism, it may upset fans of Old Boy and Lady Vengeance. And while I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK is not about hyper-violence and the metaphysics of revenge, the dizzying array of ideas may be more than many audiences can stomach in one sitting. It may just seem so off-the-wall that you lose patience before the story gets going. Which would be a shame.

So maybe take a very deep breath. Make sure your batteries are fully charged. If it doesn't blow you out the cinema - I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK - may just blow your mind.

The director's stamp is all over I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK. It's filled with the trademark beautiful visuals, bold uses of colour and CG flourishes fans of Park Chan-wook will appreciate. Also familiar from his Vengeance Trilogy are the imaginative fantasy sequences, and a similar score that gives off the impression of a director putting on a pair of comfortable slippers.

The film though is a disappointing misfire. While it picks up in the second half where something resembling a plot kicks in, far too much time is spent on frankly boring episodes, with a script that seems content to observe the goings-on inside the mental hospital where the film takes place without commenting on them or concern for narrative impetus. After nearly an hour or so of this it's tempting to switch off, and I wish I could say the pay-off was worth persevering for, but it falls just short.

There are a handful of wonderful individual moments in the picture, particularly in the second half: the amateur surgery to implant a device into our heroine's back, a tense cafeteria sequence where the patients are as nervous about the outcome of a meal as the audience, a couple of magical but all-too-brief musical numbers, doctors mown down in a hail of bullets. They're incorporated seamlessly into the movie, but they have a tendency to stick out like sore thumbs considering everything surrounding them is so dull.

Ultimately it's quite a touching film with some funny moments - and it looks gorgeous - but it doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose and fails more often than not in its attempts to be quirky.

There are ways to do romantic comedies, just as their are ways of doing sincere dark comedies set in mental hospitals, and Chan-Wook Park goes to fantastic and unexpected lengths of subverting expectations with truly nutty- and this may be the nuttiest movie to come out of Korea this, uh, month- ideas and visuals being explored, while never skimping on making these people to care about. And yes, the "cyborg" Cha Young-Goon (Su-Jeung Lim), at first seems like a typical nut, or what one might stereotype as. Indeed, as I thought more about it, what Park goes for is almost experimental; what would it be like to have as the pivotal character of a movie the person in the loony bin who is near unresponsive to other people and who won't eat any food? At first we're plunged into her mind-set: she's a cyborg, after all, and she marks up her energy levels by her toes lighting up, and takes in such energy by licking batteries as opposed to regular consumption.

But she also has a troubled past, though more-so in the memories of her grandmother, whom she was closest with, and who we see in flashbacks was tossed away into a sanitarium, as Young-Goon was eventually, instead of actually dealing with them as real fellow family members. It's hard not to get caught up further into her much more real plight when shock treatment comes around, and that the feeding tubes just won't do any good. From the sound of this it sounds like a really tragic story, and in a way it is. But on the other hand, it absolutely isn't all the same. It's Park's funniest film, loaded with his bravura sense of style that is brutally self-conscious with the camera (lots of wonderful usages of color from greens to reds to whites and blues and so on, 360' pans, high-flying shots, a great split-screen involving two characters in two separate solitary rooms connected by two cups and a string) as well as with very assured direction. To see someone make films like 'Cyborg' or Oldboy is to see someone who doesn't mind obviously flashy moments, because there are just as many moments that are more intimate in connection between the characters.

But as I said, it's a very funny movie, with the various character in the mental hospital veritable caricatures: there's one guy who got tossed in by apologizing to everyone involved in an accident he wasn't involved in, and one fat woman who when not stealing Young-Goon's food is trying to get static electricity going from rubbing her feet, and random characters doing wacky things in the halls behind main characters talking. There's a big belly laugh at the 'picture book' of the Cyborg's, where it lists the seven deadly sins, inexplicably linked to the torture and murder of cats in the classic storybook pictures. There's even an actor who comes closest to looking like the Korean Bruce Campbell! And the scenes with Young-Goon going into super-violent mode as the cyborg and shooting everything in sight ranks right up with the corridor fight sequence in Oldboy as Park at his most staggering in choreographing mayhem.

But then there's Rain's character Park Il-sun, who is the counterpoint for Young-Goon, as he's just a crazy thief in on his fifth voluntary commitment. He'll be hopping around one moment, or imagining himself going very tiny so as to not be noticed. But what the two of them share, no matter what, is vulnerability, which soon they see in each other (or at least Il-Sun sees in Young-Goon), with scenes showing either one crying their eyes out actually being earned. It's as much of a credit to the actors as it is to Park that none of this is false sentimentality, and out of the wild comedy there is subtext always present, of the director meeting the willing audience member halfway- it is a mental hospital, and no matter how crazy it can be they aren't tapped out of life completely. This makes up the emotional tie between the two main characters, and the struggle to compromise a mental state that can't be fixed and a more pragmatic goal- eating food- leads to a real emotional highlight.

Only the denouement, or what could be considered that perhaps, as there's a nuke/bomb element thrown in with outdoor rain scenes that feel real unnecessary (albeit there's a tremendous final shot for the film), and little bits involving the supporting characters that could be left out (what's with the guy that won't stop yelling?). Otherwise, this is still prime work going on, daring even, as far as blending together some real surrealistic tendencies with the kind of spirit that went into One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It takes guts to put the personal with the wacky, but somehow I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK pulls it off better than any other film I can't think of in recent memory.