Je suis un cyborg

Like all good movies, "I'm a Cyborg" is more than the sum of its plot points. So don't be put off by the synopsis. Normally, the minute I'm hearing "modern fairy tale", "touching love story", or "poetic images", I'll turn tail and run. But when I found out this is by the guy who made "Old Boy", I knew it had to be different. And it is. Think "Angels of the Universe" meets "Twelve Monkeys", packed with visual thrills. The opening sequence is one of the biggest kicks of its kind.Wheels are spinning are gears are grinding in pale translucent green, vaguely reminiscent of x-ray images. It turns out we are observing a Cyborg's inner life, cleverly interwoven with the opening scenes of the actual feature. Before we really understand how Cha (cover girl Su-Jeong Lim) ended up on the funny farm, the camera is gliding downstairs in an impossible dolly shot, smoothly passing through closed doors, down to the asylum's mysterious sub-basement with its candy-colored pipework. In the course of the movie's 105 minutes, Chan-Wook Park takes us from Seoul to the Swiss alps and back again. I say, forget Bollywood. South Korea is the new Hollywood.

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 am a big fan of Park Chan-Wook's "Vengeance" trilogy, and though I knew this would be a different beast, I was keen to see it nonetheless. It is essentially the story of two young people with acute mental problems caused by family troubles. The first, Young- Goon, is a girl who believes she is a cyborg, and is sectioned after attempting to recharge while working on a radio manufacture production line. The second is a young man played by the apparently famous Korean singer Rain (I regret to say I can't confirm his celebrity as I know nothing about Korean pop), who is certainly a talented actor based on the evidence here. He believes, and makes other inmates believe, that he can "steal" anything, including their personal traits and characteristics. Young-Goon won't eat because her delusion convinces her that if she does she will break down irreparably, but she is befriended by Il-Sun (Rain) who devotes his energies to coming up with a strategy for getting her to eat. This film contains moments of mad genius, which I won't divulge here, but for all it's flaws it's worth seeing just for the fantasy set-pieces. However, it touches on mawkish sentimentality at times (a condition not previously noted in Park's films), and initially the inhabitants of the sanitarium seem comedic caricatures who are there merely for our voyeuristic amusement. I'm A Cyborg is definitely at it's best when Park indulges his flair for stunning visual sequences and imaginative story-telling. So while I don't rate it as highly as I do his "Vengeance" films, it certainly warrants pride of place in modern Korean cinema.

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.

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.