C'est assez fauché et il y a quelques soucis de rythme mais je suis vraiment contente de voir de la science-fiction sud-coréenne quasi expérimentale sortir au cinéma en France. Je trouve que certains trucs fonctionnent vraiment très bien (tout le discours sur la pénurie d'eau, la psychose saniste, les écrans omniprésents...) et le film tend un miroir à notre propre traitement des flux migratoires et de la pandémie. Au-delà de la dystopie, le film est aussi très beau et les couleurs sont absolument fascinantes au sens premier du terme. Curieuse de voir le prochain long métrage de Park Sye-young !Note : c'est pas dans les crédits Letterboxd mais Jeon Go-woon est au générique comme soutien important du film.
Low-budget, experimental and oddly hypnotic. It asks for your patience, but rewards it. The music especially plays a huge part in drawing you in.
“They said, ‘the ocean used to be blue.’”Such a strange & wholly dystopian vision from Park Sye-young that invokes such a feeling of striking dread & an atmosphere so cursedly hopeless & alike a reality of slow accustomation of our very own when we remember sudden slight things from the past to the change that has drastically occurred. Looking through his work, at a skim, he seems to be involved in short films & abstract honing of a psychedelic eye he holds. A visual distnictness that’s so far committed you feel the world become a reality via immersion, a so strong one. & while I don’t necessarily notice producers, Philippe Bober was one that stood out & upon looking through his credits, yes, he’s all too familiar. He’s so fucking tapped in to these strange but consistent delights of auteur-like visions.A world of the radioactive & dangerous Omega people. Their fish like qualities only distinguishable by their 3 toes on their feet & the fin of life that’s theirs. In a dreadful Korea where water is scarce & the blame is put on the Omegas.Which also plays as an immigrant story of sentimental & hidden shames that hit pretty substantially along with the crating beauty of shots that Park Sye-young is able to frame with a hefty serenity. I’ve seen some reviews, on a skim too, because I’ve never heard of this & just stumbled on its trippy poster in the barrels of daily drops of 🏴☠️,& it’s anything but slow, idk but idrc to find any meaning in those as such because here the world is so finely tuned in a strange dread that I couldn’t keep my eyes off & my attention was engaged by this gritty, dirty & visually sapphic world. Thank god for the flag, 🏴☠️, or else I would’ve definitely never seen it!Yeon Yi-ji plays Mia with an eastern play of what a western depiction would be because oftentimes I’d forget this was a Korean film by a Korean production. It stands on its own with an energy & a playful campiness of the matters of cope that’s played for the devastating Korea these folks who yearn for the way things were in the Golden Faith Fishing Store.Mia has such a game effort & a snarky performance to her hatred & denial that bubbles up without much exposition. Rarely is there exposition that’s quite common in Korean cinema, that when done right it feels as thrilling as its action at a pace that equals it but that’s often not the case, with short, sharp & a more realistic depiction of actual talk & reactions that you’d find in hateful strangers. Intruding truths. Stripped to naked uncomfortability of the burden of truth from lies. The way it’s all played with propagandized specist Omega defamations & superstitions are marvelously & poetically realized through Kim Pureum’s Su-jin a newly recruited government worker who deports these Omegas as they hide their Omeganess among the messy muck of new civility, the immigrant. Where she comes from, who she harbors a self-conflicting reaction to Omegas that isn’t hers. & her final devastation is quite hermosa.A strange Korean film that feels nothing like, even in its bastion of strange Korean films, mostly due to the style it plays in & the control of Park Sye-young from it. As well as a ravishingly experimental score from Mia’s Yeon Yi-ji!! & Seok-Young HAAM who give it this other worldly & chaotic blasts of hypnotic sadness!!!“I walked through the city & when the rain falls or when the wind blows, I close my eyes & say a prayer that only I can hear.”
