Synopsis
"Oh, Human being, the poorest in this dark world"--Victor Hugo The feeling that a dark shadow is staring at me, a nightmare, madness, fear, murderous desire, obsession, ignorance, deja-vu, lack of communication... Could the common thread of these words be symptoms of an end-of-century mood, the mood that we wouldn't believe in salvation even if it gave us hope...?A surgeons hand is shaking. An affair with a stranger is trampled by a gangster. An actor cries that the world sucks. The radio tells the news of earthquakes and suicides. Sun-Yung(KIM Min), who loved me(AHN Sung-Ki), left. I wander all over the city looking for her, like Travis from 'The Taxi Driver', but I keep returning to the place where Ive already been before. My consciousness goes backward to the past and is sucked into a huge black hole. I feel like I will be locked in an unknown darkness forever, dreaming of myself as being dead. The director follows the main characters consciousness using a black and white screen to describe the uncertain and dark mood of people in the contemporary world. That is how we can feel the directors serious obstinacy. This director was brave enough to choose for his debut the novel , written by CHOI In-Ho, who was best friend of the director BAE Chang-Ho in the 80s. And his boldness seems to be working, since it transfers the contemporary's mood and their tears to us for as long as the final scene of Vive L'Amour (Ming-liang Tsai, 1994) does. It seems like the director is saying, It sucks, doesnt it? It sucks to death, uh? (PARK Sung-Kyung)