One of four out-and-out revenge sagas to dominate this festival’s That’s Incredible Cinema programme, A Bittersweet Life is easily the coolest, most frenetic, and bleakly humorous of the violent quartet. CALEB STARRENBURG tallies the body count.


LIKE Park Chan-wook’s revenge trilogy, A Bittersweet Life is filmed in the familiar hue of Korean-vengeance cinema. Noted in the Festival Form Guide, Kim Jee-woon’s film boasts the aesthetic proficiency and haute violence typical of the genre. However – free of pretension or emotional baggage – A Bittersweet Life bears more resemblance to John Woo’s gangster-noir A Better Tomorrow than it does Old Boy.

A Bittersweet Life’s protagonist Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun, whom I’ve heard compared to a young Chow Yun-Fat, though I couldn’t quite see it) is a mob enforcer ordered by his boss Kang (Kim Yeong-cheol) to keep an eye on his young girlfriend (Shin Min-a, who you'll recognise as Volcano High’s Icy Jade). If she cheats on him, he must kill her and the lover.

Sun-woo's stoically cool character (perennially clothed in dark tailored suits) refuses to reveal his growing affection for the boss's cello-playing girlfriend – not even to himself. When the enforcer makes an unwise if morally comprehensible decision, his life is marked by Kang. This leads to a series of gratuitously violent set-pieces, in which Sun-woo must fight his way through a seemingly infinite number of gang-soldiers to seek retribution on his boss.

Tortured, beaten, stabbed, shot and even buried alive – framed with precision and set to a rousing classical score – Sun-woo is one tough bastard, even by Korean gangster cinema standards. However, the inability of Lee’s character to express any emotion beyond a desire for revenge also relegates the film to a one-dimensional ‘belligerent’ status. Yet, it is a status that A Bittersweet Life relishes; this is a film which knows what it is about, and does it well.

Even the interaction between the enforcer and the girlfriend (Shin’s understated performance is all too fleeting) is limited, while a father-figure and son relationship between Kang and Sun-woo is buried (yes, literally) just as it begins to build momentum – traded in for flying bullets, buckets of blood and frantic martial-arts mayhem.

Kim (who also directed the popular K-Horror A Tale of Two Sisters) tempers the relentless violence with a vein of bleak homicidal humour – ala his 1998 black comedy The Quiet Family. Occasionally these comic moments fall flat – however, a notable scene in which Sun-woo negotiates with an arms dealer is one you are not likely to forget.

Despite a deliberately ambiguous ending, in which Sun-woo reflects on events by way of a Buddhist parable, there is nothing particularly new in A Bittersweet Life. In fact, the film quotes liberally from a host of directors: Quentin Tarantino, Takashi Kitano and Takashi Miike, to the aforementioned John Woo (meanwhile, much of the action takes place in a hotel called ‘La Dolce Vita’). However, as Korean revenge-chic reaches its apex with the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals screening Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, A Bittersweet Life might just be the film to fulfill your post-vengeance cravings.