A Bittersweet Life (2005)

A Korean gangster, Kim Sun-woo, is told to shadow his boss’s girlfriend to find out if she’s unfaithful. If she is, he must execute her and the man she’s with. When Sun-woo can’t go through with it, his life gets complicated.

Sun-woo is presented to us as the epitome of professionalism, a man equally comfortable while obsequiously pouring drinks for his boss and while beating up thugs from a rival organisation. Early long shots that follow him gliding through the gleaming, symmetrical decor of the hotel owned by his organisation underscore the impression of his infallibility. The camera moves from the visitor’s areas to ramshackle brick service corridors with leaking ceilings, which I took to mean little more than that the Korean mob’s respectable front hides a grubby interior. But it seems to replicate the experience of watching A Bittersweet Life, too.

The first twenty minutes of the film are typical to a fault, introducing Sun-woo, his boss, the task that’s set to him, with room for action scenes and the first blush of attraction between him and his boss’s mistress, Hee-soo. Present too is the definite implication of infidelity – he doesn’t yet have proof, but it’s almost certain that he’s eventually going to have to kill her. In this respect, the film’s conflict plays out fairly predictably. What’s odd is its tone.

The first sign that I wasn’t watching something by-the-numbers (if very well-made) came with the introduction of the loathsome Baek, the employer of the thugs Sun-woo casually dispatched. He’s not happy. He calls Sun-woo, who’s apathetic, telling him to come to the hotel and speak to him in person if he has a problem, then hanging up. What follows is an odd mixture of comedy and brutality, as Baek snatches the handle of the corded phone away when one of his henchmen tries to take it and redial. The cord detaches from the phone, rendering it useless. It’s a neat gag, and the henchman can’t help but giggle. The psychopathic Baek explodes, throws the phone at him, comes around the desk, and uses the phone to beat him till we hear the wet thump of flesh and bone rupturing. He can't use a phone with bloody hands, so another henchman flips open a phone and puts it to his ear without having dialed anyone. Baek is incensed to the point of giving up entirely, cursing at his incompetent staff before telling the man who to call.

That dual sense of comedy and brutality pervades A Bittersweet Life. Scenes which would be tiresome if played straight, with Sun-woo as an invincible action hero killing his way through the mob, become arresting, tense, and amusing as they're played to maximise the bumbling of all involved. Sun-woo’s veneer of urbane unflappability is shattered when his boss finds out he didn’t kill the unfaithful girlfriend, and he’s brutalised and brought low in surprisingly pathetic ways. From then on he’s less the dangerous gangster we saw early on then a sort of scrappy, miserable underdog, like a hard-boiled PI on the downslope of one of his stories, taking beating after beating while trying to reach the truth. The film has the familiar skeleton of a revenge narrative – our hero trying to get even with the boss who betrayed him – but engagingly subversive execution which keeps it from ever getting boring.

A Bittersweet Life begins and ends with two pieces of sappy Zen wisdom. A disciple sees a tree moving in the wind and asks his master what moves. “Neither the wind nor the branches move, it is your heart and mind”, his master says. Later, the same disciple awakens from a dream, sobbing, and says he cries even though it was a good dream, because he knew it was too good to ever come true. I’m not sure those extracts are appropriate – the film’s subversively comic approach and its casual brutality seems to work against their melodramatic, faux-profound nature, even as the occasionally-overwrought weeping violins of the soundtrack and Lee Byung-hun’s moving performance as Sun-woo justify their inclusion. The film seems torn between Fargo-esque black comedy and an urge to romanticise its subject matter. But even if it’s not perfectly-realised, it’s certainly worth a look.