Samaritan girl (2004)

During the last few weeks, I've watched a batch of Kim Ki-Duk films. My gut reaction is that his films are artistically interesting, but morally a bit shady. Samaritan girl does not change my mind in that respect. In many ways, it is a typical Ki-Duk production. The question about problematic female sexuality (which, in many films, is seen as a threat, something that challenges the stability of the world) remains in the limelight. Kim Ki Duk's peculiar perspective on violence is ever-present. The story of the film is quite horrendous (and very misogynistic): a very young girl works as a prostitute while her shy friend, Yeo-Yin is the business manager. When the police is about to interrupt one rendezvous, the girl jumps from a window, and dies at hospital. Yeo-Yin, seeking some sort of redemption /expiation, meets every client her friend has slept with, goes through with the act, and returns to him the money from the first transaction. In the second part of the film, Yeo-Yin's activities are unintentionally revealed to her father who, in a third segment of the film, embarks on a spiritual journey of his own, which involves violence and an attempt to bring his daughter back to virginal purity. 

Though not a Pretty woman, Samaritan girl is, in my opinion, too overloaded with symbolism and metaphors. As a story about redemption, this pic has some merits, but it also contains far too many ugly clichés about the secret of female sexuality to really be of any interest. Actually, I doubt that anything good can be dug out from the whore/madonna dichotomy - and this is proven by this film. What is more, the idea of "female innocence" torn to pieces by males is never really questioned here - rather, Ki-Duk creates a lugubrious tale about a cruel world in which innocent girls are whiffed into a life of obscenities.

The reason why Ki-Duk's film haunt me is because his films always contain two or three scenes where everything is in the right place, cinematically speaking. Yeo-Yin's father sit quietly in his car, covered with colorful leaves, surrounded by an eerie, stern, blue-ish light. Nothing happens. We just see him sitting there. The very ending scenes, in which Yeo-Yin's father teaches his daughter to drive a car, has an almost otherworldly beauty - along with a few layers of meaning.