First Published in KINO-KOLO, Ukrainian Film Quarterly, Summer 2001)

IT HURTS Analytical screening (extended edition) Translated by Leonid Alekseychuk (first published in KINO-KOLO, Ukrainian Film Quarterly, summer 2001) Strong, vibrant, resilient: the fish dancing on a hook is a feast for the eyes. A stocky fiftyish angler pulls her out and throws her on his pontoon raft w ith a doll-house of a cabin. A pretty hooker beside him laughs watching the catc h. Her client suggests an appetizer for the forthcoming sex: a slice of "sushi". A morsel of flesh throbbing with life? Who would refuse such a treat? Well-being incarnate, the client cuts off the fish's plump sides and lets t he rest go. Free to gambol mutilated in her element. If you've never heard bare flesh chafe against water, this emphatically und erstated, matter-of-fact shot will sensitise your ear. If you've never seen a we eping fish, try this time: imperceptible tear beads will remain in water long af ter she makes a few uncertain, almost incredulous movements and disappears in th e deep. These impulsive sensations are precisely calculated: what is actually shot and recorded compels you to feel what the author feels; a razor-sharp picture ca rves in you something invisible and indelible; the image and your reaction to it are inseparable parts of the scene, one without the other would render it painf ully unfinished. Well, this is what excellent directing is all about. That stripped fish alone is a passionate plea in defence of skinned people. Both watchers and participants, we avidly absorb this universal agony, imperson ated by a living creature and personalized in a human being. Well, this is what we call poetry. It heals by hurting, the deeper the wound the sharper the pleasure to feel it. Despite being taught a hard lesson, the stripped fish will bite again. From the hands of another angler, she'll get away with much less trouble. That tall and handsome fellow could not care less about fishing. On the run from the police, he hangs on the hook himself. A floating hut on the lake, one of many in this fishing camp site, is the fugitive's hideout. He just feigns ang ling, often on an empty hook. In a fit of despair, while chopping at the catch furiously and endlessly, u ntil that throbbing sushi turns into a bloody mash, in the mutilated fish he rec ognizes his sworn sister, in her bloody wounds his own, and lets her go. She is his next of kin. Actually theirs: the camp's owner and manager - as well as his lover - is another creature with bleeding flanks. * * * These are just two scenes from a film, born initially from word and into word recondensed. Not back into word, but forward, into a new text attempting t o preserve the intensity of acting and scenery through personal perception. In other words, an emotional summary: a heresy for the critic. Supposed to be cold as a dog's nose, that unfortunate creature is banned from using any arti stic means while discussing art. Shouldn't the excellence of a judge be judged b y his detachment from emotions raging in the courtroom? Depends. Passion for truth is not only a strong emotion, but also the only way to examine the case in all its fullness and complexity. Only passion, not in difference, enables the judge to side with both sides and rise above both. This is tenfold true when applied to art. On hearing of an unfamiliar artistic phenomenon, what do we prefer: a dry p rofessional approval and/or frustration, an academic lecture or a trustworthy pe rson's spontaneous outburst? Be it admiration or disappointment, the viewer ofte n justifies either attitude by describing its source. Thus stimulated to see the work, you might react to it differently, but it does not mean that you and your friend have seen different films: surprisingly, one's pronounced attitude does not distort the source but makes it multidimensional. To retell as clearly, as vividly and as fully as possible any film (in our case, The Isle by Korean director Kim Ki Duk) we have, in a certain sense, to ap propriate it (as any viewer does instinctively) and take all the responsibilitie s implied (as remarkably few critics do intentionally). Instead of shooting arou nd incontestable opinions on a haphazardly encapsulated work, we'll try to match the filmmaker's hellish investment at least with an attentive look at it - toge ther with the readers, of course, no matter whether they saw the film or not. Those who didn't might get hooked on the story; those who did might realize that they have seen precious little or nothing at all: the gain is clear in bot h cases. Nor should the traps be ignored. What is more risky: to smear somebody else 's canvas with an intrusive brush or to dim the original colours with a monochro me abstract? Since any retelling, impersonal or too personal, is always an interpretatio n, the original's refraction through the teller's crystalline lens, where is the midpoint between a raving admirer and a lifeless dummy? Quite a trade: without a literary critic's freedom to quote the original! What should the critic project on the page: colours or colourlessness, crea tive writing or a chilling verdict? Should we analyse a dry extract or stain the page with real blood? In the latter case, wouldn't such haemorrhage, commonly a filmmaker's lot, unsettle the criti c's Olympian detachment? When prey to such tragic doubts, testing both extremes seems a reasonable s olution. Sincere interest implies a delicate touch: even a telegram reveals whether it was dictated by love or indifference. Anything you like except gawking with a fish eye at a weeping fish. Pity her performer's name is not mentioned in the titles. Being the third p rotagonist after the leading couple -- and moreover -- an integral third of that strange trinity, she merits such an honour. Although the human protagonists don't really need names either. Lest only t o distinguish themselves from other fish. Who are they, those two on the lake? * * * Here is a brief synopsis from a festival program: "Hee Jin lives, selling the fishermen meals during the day and her body at night. On the lake arrives ex- policeman Hyun Shik, who has killed his unfaithfu l girlfriend. He tries to commit suicide, but Hee Jin prevents it, and then sedu ces Hyun Shik. Sex with Hee Jin becomes for him a narcotic against a physical an d mental pain. Attracted to sex like fish to one hook, both arrive at an unexpec ted catastrophe." Concise and clear. Wonderful for an anatomic museum. Let it be however: without a skeleton, flesh will grow neither. Here, at least, one can see the hands of the director and his press agents, constrained to pour a lake into a glass. They've even managed to preserve a dro plet of poetry and to cast a hook with a narco-bait. (Just as compressed, many a newspaper critics' summaries are often diluted by emptiness. Barely recapturing the storyline, their detached authors believe naively to express the work's ver y essence.) How about the choice of heroes? Are they worthy of watching? A policeman an d a prostitute: doesn't the screen swarm of their clones like a spawning-ground of hard roe? As far as Hyun Shik is concerned, neither his profession nor his crime are of any dramatic relevance nor, consequently, of any interest. His murder of an u nfaithful girlfriend, illustrated by a hasty and artless flashback, seems the di rector's reluctant concession to our schooling by the "psychological" cinema: to pester fictional characters with inquiries about their past. What if they refused to answer? Would we lose our interest or become twice as curious? The mask does not chatter about its family circumstances, that's part of it s mystery. Just as silent is Hyun Shik, a suicide full of life all but pampered by it. Shuttling the newcomer to his raft, Hee Jin grasps this at first sight. She already knows by instinct what she'll discover later on so tactfully: now with a furtive glance from a mooring in front of her house, now with a seemingly occa sional "control visit" to the strange angler's raft, to bait the empty hook on h is fishing line and, without betraying her presence, to glimpse him sob crouched in the cabin, with his head dropped on his knees and his shoulders shaking. That's enough for her to divine the exact moment of an imminent tragedy, to dive under the raft when a gun is already at the suicide's temple and to stab h is leg when his finger is about to pull the trigger. From a sudden pain Hyun Shik will jump up with a yell and want to live agai n, while she will be already rowing back in silence. Any inquiries, let alone co nsolatory conversations, are categorically excluded: if for Hyun Shik a half-pag e of text can be scrapped up in the entire film, Hee Jin doesn't utter a single word. For a while, her absolute muteness seems a clinical impairment. Further in the story, a single phone call she makes -- significantly, also a silent one, on ly seen through the window - upgrades a presumed ailment to a captivating interi or trauma, with a generous windfall for characterisation. "I reflected so much that I don't have anything to say", the Sphinx in Flau bert's Temptation of S.

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