Cycle index

Breathless

Ddongpari

dir. Yang Ik-June / South Korea 2008 / 130’

subtitles: Polish and English

Panorama $9.99, 12 Lotus, Beeswax, Blue Beard, Breathless, Collectress, Ecce Momo!, Hooked, I am Not Your Friend + I Will Not Be Your Friend, Katalin Varga, Machan, My Only Sunshine, My Sweet Shirin, North, Nymph, Ordinary People, Palermo Shooting, Parque vía, Rachel Getting Married, Ricky, Schottentor, Seraphine, Stella, The Northern Land, The Other One, The Rat Herb, The Visitor, The White Ribbon, Two Lines, Under the Tree, Winter Silence Section index

Cast

Yang Ik-June, Kim Kkobbi, Lee Hwan, Joung Maan Sik

Film description

Song-hoon knows the language of debt collection very well. It consists of vocabulary of swearwords, punctuation of violence, returned blows as commas, kicks to end a sentence, exclamation marks that make people collapse. This is how he communicates with the world. With elderly people, with his peers, with youth at demonstration. Will a young, brazen girl become a catalyst of his emotional re-education? A realistically depicted, partially autobiographic story impresses especially as a vivisection of a personality shaped by hereditary determinism. The paranoid reality of toxic, hatred-ridden relationships is just a distillate of the character's tragic past. The debutant Yang Ik-June does not shun the obvious truth that violence is a force of destruction, a virus which infects all families, controls hearts and fists. At the same time, he shows violence as a code, as a language of society, easy to learn, reiterated all the time, conveying definite messages. Nobody would like to hear them.

Michał Walkiewicz