MUBI

Le dernier film de Park Chan-wook évoque un vampire devenant amoureux d’une femme. Le postulat de départ peut être intéressant sauf que le cinéaste s’égare totalement au fur et à mesure que le film avance. Si on doit reconnaître que d’un point de vue esthétique et formel, l’oeuvre est très jolie et possède une photographie sublime. Cependant, bien insuffisant pour palier un scénario incongru. La façon dont le prêtre devient vampire est trop tirée par les cheveux pour moi. Par la suite, le cinéaste s’égare dans une relation amour – haine entre le vampire et la femme, qui deviendra par la suite une vampire aussi. Entre le prêtre respectant les êtres humaines et cette femme, déjà manipulatrice avant sa “vampirisation” qui se transforme en un être assoiffé de sang et de meurtre. Pour le reste, il y a des thèmes sur le fond, mais bien mal exploité. On retrouve au fond la valeur du sang, qu’est la vie, les questionnement d’un prêtre au fur et à mesure qu’il avance dans les plaisirs charnels, etc. Mais c’est gâché par une réalisation qui à force de privilégier l’esthétique et le côté formel en a oublié qu’un film ne se regarde pas qu’avec de jolies images…

Definitely not for everyone, Bakjwi [Thirst] is an interesting, intelligent take on the vampire genre. By using this horror film affliction, director Chan-wook Park weaves a parable on religion and faith, showing how two people on both ends of the spectrum value life itself. All the tropes are here, as the diseased characters have super-human strength, must stay out of the sunlight, and consume blood for sustenance. What they have not lost, however, is their humanity, or lack there of, from their past lives. There is no better or more controversially way to express all this than through the eyes or a priest—a man of God turned beast of evil. How does he react to his need for blood and the flesh? How does he come to grips with being a creature so close to the gates of hell? How does he reconcile his new life and passions with the moral compass he has long had pointing true? It is all touched upon within this adult romantic nightmare, perhaps not always giving us answers, but definitely stimulating our thoughts and feelings about both life and death.

Priest Sang-hyun works in hospitals, giving last rites and helping the infirmed cope with their mortality. After one more death witnessed, he decides he must leave and do something for the good of humanity, something that could help save people. A blind priest that has acted like a father to him tries his best to dissuade the decision, pleading with him once more to become a doctor and one day heal his eyes, but it falls on deaf ears. Sang-Hyun goes to an experimental facility that is working on an answer for an incurable disease called EV. The question of suicide, which plays a major part in the proceedings, comes into play initially at this time. Spoken as ‘martyrdom for the devil’ to a parishioner, the priest is asked at the facility whether his intentions of being a volunteer with this disease is to perform some sort of elaborate euthanasia on himself. The question doesn’t even cross his mind, though, he has his prayer and God to get him through the ordeal, hopefully surviving and helping to create a cure for all. We watch the blisters form and the blood pore from his mouth, eventually leading to a flatline and pronouncement of death before, like Lazarus, he rises alive once more. Unaware at first until deducing through a series of tests, this single survivor from the EV test group finds that the blood transfusion given to him has turned him into a vampire.

The story truly begins here as Sang-hyun crosses paths with an old acquaintance in Kang-woo and his family. As a young orphan, Lady Ra fed him noodles and Kang-woo was his friend. Tae-ju, who was thought to be a daughter, ends up being an adopted ward who has since become wife to her ‘brother’, yet ultimately is more slave dog than true member of the family. Sang-hyun walks into all this just as the power of the blood pumping within his veins is taking control. And this is where the moral ambiguity comes into play, creating an awkward number of scenes depicting this man of the cloth succumbing to the flesh. Constantly flogging himself for his arousal and impure thoughts, he still finds an unnatural attraction to Tae-ju, which she shares. Leading to one of the most uncomfortable sex scenes I’ve ever seen on film—both for the fact he is a priest while she is married to a man right down the hallway and for the vampiric overtones of him doing his best to suppress the desire to sink his teeth into her shoulder—the union bonds them forever. But he values life too much and while no longer considering himself a priest, due to the fact he is sleeping with this women as often as he can, he still will not allow himself to murder for food. Instead, he feeds from a patient in a coma at the hospital, a man that admitted his charitable ways in helping the hungry to him.

Thirst is shot with precise attention to detail, leading our eyes exactly where the filmmakers would like them to go. Park is a master of tone and deliberate subtlety, at times making the film drag, but ultimately lending it an artistic aesthetic that is his own. Everything leads up to the moment where Tae-ju finally becomes a vampire herself. Being a woman of no faith thanks to the harsh, unloving upbringing she had, death is death to her, there is no afterlife. So, these two lovers evolve to form a juxtaposition of true bloodlust and humane compassion. Sang-hyun begins to help people kill themselves in order to take their blood, now providing a service that his former self was very much against, while Tae-ju decides to go out and seek prey, reveling in the sport of it all. The final act depicting these two—both lovers and enemies at once—is by far the strongest portion of the film. Everything pent up in their lives before is allowed to come through unchecked, leading to the only conclusion that would have fit, and I applaud Park for giving us the beautifully tragic finale that he does.

Kang-ho Song is fantastic as Sang-hyun, constantly internalizing his true self in order to be a better man. What he has become slowly takes over and the pain and suffering of the interior battle is permanently etched on his face. As Tae-ju, Ok-bin Kim is both beautiful and darkly frightening. This meek young girl, trapped in a family that she runs away from each night, pretending to sleepwalk, cannot deny her desire for this priest she knew years before as a young man. Her wanting him supercedes any fear of what he is and she uses his own desires for her benefit, helping her sever the familial bonds keeping her down, the guilt of which haunts them both in some stunningly shot sequences of nightmarish imagery soaked in water and led by Ha-kyun Shin’s Kang-woo’s grinning laughter. Not only do the two evolve in demeanor and action, though, they also alter in visual aesthetic. Park and company changes their wardrobe and appearance once they acclimate to being vampires, creating confident and indestructible versions of their former selves. The wirework that allows for their abilities and strength to be shown is well-orchestrated and darkly comic at times—like much of the film—especially when lifting things. But Park Chan-wook always keeps an underlying humor in his films, making their tragic subject matter even bleaker. Thirst is no different, once again giving us something to think about and process as each second passes; no one would ever call his work a walk in the park.

Bakjwi [Thirst] 8/10

http://jaredmobarakreviews.wordpress.com/2010/01/02/thirst/

Park Chan-wook is proving himself more and more to be up there with David Fincher in terms of great innovative stylists and storytellers working in film today. THIRST is a movie bursting with themes and ideas, dealing with repression and loss of faith. It’s a vampire movie that is the polar opposite of the TWILIGHT vampire craze that’s dominating the market right now. The wacky tone shifts that the movies goes through will be too much for some people not used to Korean cinema, but it handles it expertly, especially during the final scene. Despite the two plus hour run-time, the pacing helps it glide by. A very good movie from one of the best directors working on the global scene.

After hearing extreme reactions on both ends of the spectrum for Thirst, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it not only is a great film, but is almost as good as the films in Park’s Vengeance Trilogy.

Park is spectacular with black comedy – perhaps as good or better than any other filmmaker working today. Here is a film that knows no restraint, and while I am a big fan of restraint, Thirst’s sheer audacity is its strong point. Special mention goes to the Foley, with the deliciously expressive slurps throughout the blood-sucking sequences.

I became completely engrossed in this film. I found it to be erotic and compelling.

Is Sang-hyun’s initial attraction to the troubled Tae-ju born of a priest’s empathetic want to heal or a vampire’s lust for blood? The answer lies somewhere in between, as evidenced by the priest’s habit to feed on the life-blood of Christian confessors consumed by suicidal tendencies.

Once Sang-hyun and Tae-ju’s passionate longing for one another is consummated through blood and sex, Thirst transcends the conventional horror film and becomes an exquisitely rendered love story; daring to flirt with scandalous notions of sadomasochism and animal desire.

Read my entire review: http://asian-films.suite101.com/article.cfm/thirst_dvd_review#ixzz0X5T
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Can someone explain to me why a movie this goofy is being heralded as the best foreign film of the year?

Firstly, whoever they had working the sound effects for this movie should be given a bullet to the head. Every scene involving kissing, winking, eating, or biting sounded like a dog licking the bottom of his bowl.

As a matter of fact, the same should go to the visual effects team as well. CGI blood? CGI water, for god’s sake? Really? Is this 1999?

Besides the fact that THIRST looks and sounds terrible, the story doesn’t have much going for it either. A priest becomes a vampire (with the whole flying and skin burning up in the sun and all) through a medical experiment; a transformation that comes quite easy to him from the get-go, despite the fact that he is a priest.

But I’ll hand it to them in the set department; the sets and color schemes of some of the shots were beautiful, but we’re not making music videos, here. Also, the attempts at shocking the viewer fail miserably thanks to a completely unbelievable plot and a cast of wonky cartoon characters who, for the most part, seem to be either extremely bipolar or mentally retarded.

Park’s worst, which is saying a lot after I’M A CYBORG… Friends have asked me what this movie was about and what went on in it, but I really don’t know where to start. A lot of nothing happens, but when there is finally some action, it’s in the form of long-winded and unnecessary sex scenes. There are numerous efforts to shock the viewer with it’s (CGI) gore and (glamorized) sex scenes, but with characters this goofy, it’s hard to keep your eyes from rolling.

The opening 5 minutes of Park’s short CUT is a better vampire piece than this.

I saw Thirst almost a month ago now, and though I thoroughly enjoyed it, I felt at the time that it didn’t quite live up to standard of the other two great foreign films I have seen this year, Hunger and Gomorrah. In the weeks that followed, however, that viewpoint rapidly began to change. I couldn’t get the film out of my head— the moral and spiritual implications of the character Sang-hyun’s actions both as a vampire and as a man were simply too enormous to be ignored. The final scene, which I will not give away, is a brilliant endgame pulled out of the quieter side of director Park Chan-wook’s usually-deafening bag of tricks. Park has combined here tragedy and farce and soft thoughts and big ideas and sin and temptation and faith and guilt and buckets and buckets of blood to create what is surely the genre piece of the year, and more than certainly one of the best pictures of the year.

While this was not terribly bad, it certainly does not match up to ANY of his other films. There was fucking CGI in it for fuck sake!? After tarentino takes a liking to him, he gets exposed to american/hollywood he decides to make a comedic, CGI’d, less than thoughtful film.

What the hell was up with the whale CGI at the end?

What the hell was up with the 15 minute softcore porn sex scene?

Don’t know about this one..