Change Your Image
jakabombac-37998
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Ah-ga-ssi (2016)
Smart, enthralling and theatre-like; but a bit too dense
I watched this a few days ago at the Ljubljana film festival. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to watch it or not, but a string of events led me to a spontaneous viewing. Why wasn't I sure? Because I expected some similarities with Oldboy, the only Chan-Wook Park film I've seen, and even though I loved Oldboy, I knew it's a specific type of cinema that gets you in a certain mood and reverberates days after.
More than the dark tone of Oldboy, I remembered the overall density of it. I felt like it didn't give me any time to breath. Despite the unquestionable quality of the film, I felt like the scenes in it were competing against one another in three main categories: wit, shock value and contrast in comparison to the previous scene. It seemed a bit technical, a bit too thought-out.
In Ah-ga-ssi I definitely spotted some similarities with Oldboy - again, not so much in the tone of the film than in the shooting techniques, editing style, theater-like squarry perspective of the shots and the incredible density and intensity of events, shown through wide angles as well as details, that pull you into a world of incredibly well painted subconscious human tendencies, into a nightmarish world where events follow a certain twisted logic and where humour appears in its most darkly form.
In another review I read that one has to understand korean history in order to better comprehend the film. I definitely agree, but I felt like Ah-ga-ssi is clear enough to let even the most unknowing spectator know what's going on. It is #intuitive enough to be able to translate the micro-meaning (site-specific, historical) onto a universal human level: even though it depicts a certain era of Korean history, it also depicts very basic human tendencies, which one can apply to several historical, as well as personal events. I feel like this is one of the most important quality of good cinema, and one of Ah-ga-ssi's main strengths.
What I also loved was the twists - varying from micro ones to big ones. All of the twists are so well drawn-out and built-up earlier in the film that the suspense is crazy. The twists are well presented and very coherent with the story. I felt a bit of Kurosawa's Rashomon in here - the three part structure, the objective/subjective truth theme and even a few visual references to Rashomon. Ah-ga-ssi is immersive and rich with flavour, but is it a bit too rich? Can a movie be too rich?
I felt like everything in this film reflected the theme of illusion - the camera movements, the tricks, the costumes, the characters and the actors. I felt like the team wanted to slightly expose the illusory nature of film as a medium - we know that we're watching something fictional but we still tend to emotionally involve in it. Why is that so? Anyway, I felt like the theater "set-up" component could be a bit more visible, it would definitely add a nice self- irony layer upon the smartly built, but a tad stiff cinema puzzle that is Ah-ga-ssi. I love the korean name of this film by the way, much more than Handmaiden. Also, a few moments of rest would be nice for the brain, especially because the tone is so dark. If the film would've been a bit more genre-versatile, I'd love the density, but since the genre definition is pretty clean-cut, because the overall tone of the film is rather dark, and because the story demands a lot of processing, I feel like this film could use a few moments of silence or completely unimportant subplots, just so that the spectator has more time to fill in the gaps with his own ideas.
The positive definitely outweighs the negative. From the first moment on, I was hooked. I sat there, looking at the actors, thinking about how incredibly good they were. I loved the nakedness & I loved the poetic intertangling of the bodies. I loved the photography in general. I remember very well how the first few minutes produced a tiny drop of uneasiness in me - a tiny drop that grew bigger and bigger as my understanding of the story was becoming better and better. And when I finally grasped all the crazy twists, the meaning behind the unusual behaviour of the characters - pop. It was like fiction immediately turning into dust, the facades shattered, the film-time becoming what it is in the first place - a remnant that can be revisited in order to be viewed again, from a different point of view.
This was definitely a crazy and cathartic experience. Maybe it would never be as cathartic if it wouldn't be so dense with information on so many different levels. Maybe it was the movie's goal - to pile up as many pieces of information one upon the other, stack the spectators mind with various opposing narratives only to be able to prove the spectator that nowadays, no narrative is the right one - we live in a make-believe world, in a constant state of cold war. We can trust nobody, we have no truth, just multidunous realities that we have to constantly update and make sense of... if we don't want to be fooled.