Love among the ruins

In his scathingly funny surrealist provocation “The Exterminating Angel,” anarchic nose-thumber Luis Bunuel depicted bourgeois convention as an intrinsic, invisible trap -- literally. At the conclusion of a dinner party in a palatial house, the guests find themselves mysteriously unable to leave. So there they remain, polite at first, then increasingly feral, as the food runs out and the atmosphere becomes foul. You get it: Convention has imprisoned them, and imprisonment has freed them from convention. The guests finally manage to escape -- only to reconvene, herdlike, at church the following Sunday. The bourgeoisie can’t help it.

Kim Ki-duk’s “Bad Guy” begins in what appears to be a similar thematic vein. Han-gi (Cho Je-hyun), a mute, brooding thug with a gruesome scar across his throat, spots the demure Sun-hwa (Seo Won), a pretty college student in a polka-dotted dress, sitting on a bench waiting for her boyfriend. Han-gi seats himself next to her, and Sun-hwa -- a seemingly impregnable fortress of privilege, education, confidence and entitlement -- shoots him a withering look, moves to another bench and dials.

The boy arrives quickly, and the lovers immediately forget about the strange man, but Sun-hwa’s slight so enrages Han-gi that he grabs her and kisses her violently. She demands an apology; he refuses and is summarily beaten by a group of nearby soldiers. As the soldiers drag him off before a crowd of onlookers, Sun-hwa spits in his face.

What begins, rather promisingly, as a visceral yawp against class difference in contemporary South Korea slowly devolves into a prolonged exercise in pointless sadomasochism. Determined to put Sun-hwa in a place other than the one she’s used to (it’s given that Han-gi could never rise to acceptability), he devises a plot to bring the girl down to his level. While browsing in a bookstore one afternoon, Sun-hwa spots a wallet filled with money and takes it, only to be chased and caught by the man to whom it belongs. The man threatens to turn her in unless she pays him an exorbitant sum; so, at his suggestion, she agrees to sign her body over to the brothel run by Han-gi.

A bizarrely far-fetched turn of events, no? It gets more allegorical still. The preppy Sun-hwa is plucked from her life -- a life, we’ve been made to understand, that has trained her to feel superior to those less advantaged and entitled to a certain degree of protection -- as easily as if she were a stray cat. There are no parents in Kim’s universe, no benign authority figures for her to turn to. Once trapped in the brothel, moreover, Sun-hwa submits to her fate helplessly, gradually accepting her new identity as Han-gi watches her through a two-way mirror with the pained look of a parent watching his baby get her shots. It comes as no surprise, then, when Sun-hwa -- now fully inoculated against her upbringing -- falls in love with her captor, returning to him even after he sets her free.

“You ruined me,” she tells Han-gi. By which she means “I love you. Take care of me.” It’s a metaphor only a Marxist critic could love, and even then, maybe not. Han-gi’s feelings for Sun-hwa, which have all the outward markings of a profound and pained love, are not quite as categorical as hers. Han-gi has been sliced into more times than a triple-tiered wedding cake and lived to tell the tale, not to mention having narrowly avoided execution for the murder of a gangster. He has also -- in a spare moment -- taken Sun-hwa for a walk on a beach, where she witnesses the suicide of her doppelganger and finds a couple of torn snapshots that she eventually pieces together into pictures of herself and her tormentor as a happy couple. In the end, he and Sun-hwa escape together to the seaside, where he pimps her out to local fishermen in the back of a truck.

The whole thing could be read, if one were in the mood, as a metaphor for the hijacking and forced vulgarization of the middle class by the resentful, striving poor -- which wouldn’t make it any less irritating. The ease with which Han-gi strips Sun-hwa of her freedom and rights remains a sticking point whether the story is taken literally, metaphorically or with lumps of sugar.

“Bad Guy” is beautifully, naturalistically shot and full of persuasive performances, but Kim seems to want the story to function at face value, as well as to explore the metaphysical possibility of destiny and fate. Is that supposed to imply that you can take the middle class out of the girl, but you can’t take the whore out of the woman?

*

‘Bad Guy’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Lots of explicit sex and graphic violence

Cho Je-hyun...Hang-gi

Seo Won...Sun-hwa

Kim Yoon-tae...Jung-tae

Choi Duk-moon...Myung-soo

A Lifesize Entertainment release. Director Kim Ki-duk. Producer Lee Seung-jai. Executive producer Kim Seung-beom. Screenplay by Kim Ki-duk. Director of photography Hwang Chol-hyun. Editor Ham Sung-won. Costume designer Jeong Hong-ju. Music Park Ho-jun. Art director Kim Sun-ju. Set decorator Oh Sang-man. In Korean with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Exclusively at Laemmle’s Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 655-4010.