I have been turning this movie over and over in my mind for the past couple of days. I couldn't organize my thoughts or figure out how to say what I wanted. A Bittersweet Life upended my expectations. I was astonished by the ways it did so. It left me a little cold at first, but I loved the black humor.
There’s also one scene that cracked me up, where Lee Byung Hun beats up two guys on his own without much exertion, yanks the car keys out of their ignition, and hurls them over a bridge. He leaves the men stranded in the middle of the road and calmly drives off. Peak cinematic poetry!
But this post is about something else entirely.
I just can't stop thinking about Shin Min Ah in this movie. I was expecting her to be a femme fatale. I assumed that the ‘cheating mistress’ in a vicious revenge movie would be cunning, toying with the men who are in love with her/want to possess her. But the opposite is true. Hee Soo is unaware of the chaos her simple existence unleashes.
She’s beautiful but not glamorous; she’s always made up and dressed very simply, radiating youth. Hee Soo doesn’t do much besides exist on the periphery. She’s beautiful. She plays the cello. That’s all there is to know.
Kang, the older mob boss who suspects Hee Soo is cheating on him with a younger man, orders his loyal hitman Sun Woo to keep an eye on her while he’s away. If Kang's suspicions are proven true, both she and the boyfriend will be killed. There isn’t much to know about Kang either. Whatever his reputation as an underworld criminal, he is profoundly ordinary: just another gross old man with a young girlfriend.
It’s obvious that Kang doesn’t love Hee Soo. She’s just a young, pretty thing he can possess. I wondered why he couldn’t have picked on someone a bit more worldly, but that imaginary woman would still be as trapped as Hee Soo, I think.
One day Sun Woo watches Hee Soo play the cello. Her music unlocks something in him that was buried beneath the years of loyal service to his boss, a shallow existence bereft of meaning.
Sun Woo spares Hee Soo’s life when he discovers her boyfriend. He’s fallen in love with her - a desire that’s so pure. He never pursues a relationship and there’s no hint of carnality, which surprised me. A romance between them is not the point, nor is it possible. Without the graphic violence this movie could easily be a film noir from the 1940s or ‘50s. Of course working within/circumventing restrictions of the Hays Code still allowed filmmakers to portray steamy love scenes without sex…but none of that is here. Bizarrely innocent movie.
Hee Soo’s survival also overturned my assumptions. It makes this unrelentingly violent saga gentle, somehow. She has no story of her own apart from being an object of desire. The film doesn’t care about her beyond her involvement with these men. But I do.