A Bittersweet Life (Film Review)

Early in the 2000s, Kim Jee-woon was considered one of the most promising South Korean directors, emerging alongside Park Chan-wook, Na Hong-jin and Bong Joon-ho. He's maybe been overshadowed by his contemporaries now, but his early work remains a testament to his versatility, moving adroitly from genre to genre with no dip in quality.

Kim followed up his exceptional ghost story A Tale Of Two Sisters with the action-packed neo-noir A Bittersweet Life. One of the director's most celebrated and successful films, it's potentially the best revenge thriller to come out of Korea not directed by Park Chan-wook. A Bittersweet Life is a more romantic, slick take on the genre than Park's brutal, visceral work, but it's no less compelling for this, with some polished set-pieces and it's fair share of nasty moments.

Well groomed and a consummate professional, Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) is an efficient enforcer for the mob, earning the respect of his boss Mr. Kang (Kim Yeong-cheol). When Kang is occupied with a business trip over the weekend, he employs Sun-woo to keep tabs on his young mistress He-soo (Shin Min-a) who he suspects of having an affair. When Sun-woo discovers that these suspicions are well-founded, an uncharacteristic pang of compassion prevents him from informing his boss, leading to his downfall.

Sun-woo is very consciously modelled on the laconic, solitary criminals seen in films like Le Samourai, Thief and The Driver. His fastidious, polished exterior masks a lonely existence in his sparse, empty apartment. Lee plays this role to perfection, convincingly portraying the characters outward charm and his more vulnerable, awkward side, as well as throwing himself fully into the physical scenes. Which is just as well, as he suffers an awful lot of trauma over the course of the film, getting tortured, mutilated and even buried alive.

Kim fills the film with blistering action sequences, and as the stakes rise in the film, the fight scenes get more and more excessive, beginning with a simple brawl and culminating in a breath-taking, intricately choreographed shootout. For our money though, the most memorable sequence in the film is the supremely tense scene where Sun-woo and a villain frantically race to assemble their guns quicker than each other, which remains one of the most perfectly constructed, nerve-wracking sequences in modern Asian cinema.

A Bittersweet Life remains one of Kim's most focused, satisfying films, balancing blistering action sequences with moments of introspection, clearly emulating the feel of classic neo-noir films. The film's ambiguous coda also serves as a poignant reminder of the price of playing at being a gangster. It's an appropriately bittersweet conclusion to a captivating tale.

The re-release of A Bittersweet Life along with The Foul King is a brilliant distillation of Kim's strengths as a director. Tonally the films couldn't be more different, and he would go even further with subsequent forays into the horror and western genres with I Saw The Devil and The Good The Bad The Weird. Despite the differences in tone though, both films deal with similar themes, namely the escapist fantasy of leaving your uneventful work life behind and entering a new, dangerous career, with inevitably chaotic results.

A Bittersweet Life is available on digital platforms from 8 April