Peter Bradshaw 

Arirang – review

Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk's re-enactment of his own nervous breakdown will exasperate and infuriate, writes Peter Bradshaw
  
  

Arirang
Extremely weird … Arirang. Photograph: PR

This startling, fascinating and bizarre film is in some ways the strangest arthouse event of the year. At last year's Cannes film festival, the jury of which I was a member gave it the joint top prize in the Un Certain Regard section. It's bound to exasperate and indeed infuriate as many people as it enthralls. Kim Ki-duk is the South Korean director renowned for his extreme and challenging movies such as 2001's Bad Guy and 3-Iron, from 2004; his best film is probably the 2003 haunting parable Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter … and Spring. Kim was said to be deeply shaken by a near-fatal accident on the set of his 2008 film Dream in which his lead actress was apparently almost killed. He suffered a form of breakdown, which in this extremely weird semi-documentary he now re-enacts. We see him all on his own, brooding, remembering, sobbing. There are long scenes in which he does nothing but watch his own movies – we see them, too, on a fuzzy TV screen – while the director becomes emotional. Arirang is the title of a Korean folksong that Kim himself sings in a strained, cracked voice. It is the most extravagantly self-indulgent piece of pure loopiness imaginable – but gripping as well. A piece of experimentalism at odds with convention.

 

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