Pedantic readers will know of this column’s fondness for love played out in strange displacements, and romance doesn’t come more twisted than the grand passions at the darksome heart of Kim Ki-Duk’s breakthrough film, re-issued (to excited yelps chez Brady) as part of the generally orgasmic Asia Extreme season at the UGC. And extreme, in this instance, is entirely the operative, for this notoriously fish-abusing Korean horror plays like a Blood On The Tracks ballad after it’s been radically re-envisaged, straddled and spat out by Lydia Lunch.
Set on a remote, eerily calm lake peppered with floating holiday fishing cabins, the bucolic landscape masks all manner of seamy, sadistic and possibly mythological goings-on. Hee-Jin (Seo Jeong), a haunting and haunted looking mute girl (who may have wandered in from a Salinger fantasy), rents the small bobbing huts to various un-gentlemanly anglers for the purposes of fishing and whoring. At night she rows out among her tenants selling live bait and numb sexual favours, though her grim warden duties are shared with various visiting prostitutes.
A strange mutual infatuation develops between our enigmatic heroine and a young, suicidal visitor. He’s on the run, having killed his wife and her lover, yet his attempts to end his life are continually thwarted by a strange sub-aquatic presence, and it becomes quickly apparent that Hee-Jin is no ordinary gal, but a water-sprite or elemental goddess or some such. When they finally get to fucking, his aggressive bedside manner prompts her to beat a hasty retreat, and she calls a prostitute in to service him, triggering a maelstrom of jealousy, rape and murder.
Already something of a cult classic, this decidedly barbaric, oddly sensual fable triggers a delightful Proustian rush of Dario Argento’s grotesque erotica, Cronenberg’s body horror, Tarkovsky’s allegorical brooding and Bergman’s tortuous gender relations. It shares the simultaneously repulsive, yet amorously affecting instincts of director Kim’s Bad Guy, and the incongruous pastoral appreciation of his recent Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… Spring.
But pretty scenery aside, The Isle is not one for the faint-hearted. Nor indeed, for those individuals who spend their nocturnal hours super-gluing up the locks on fishmongers in earnest support of piscine rights (I should point out that I have a very sound alibi for the night of the 24th). Rather, it’s an audacious, disturbing, incredible piece of cinema that will put you off sushi bars for life.
Come on, if you think you’re hard enough…