Bad Guy (Nabbeun namja), directed by Kim Ki-Duk, is a dark tale about prostitution in Seoul. When the film begins, thirtysomething Hang-Gi (played by Cho Je-Hyun) sees a moderately attractive twenty-year-old college student, Sun-Hwa (played by Seo Won), waiting on a park bench. A pimp and an ex-convict, he lusts after her but does not know how to approach her, so he sits down next to her. Disturbed that an obvious thug is glaring at her, she is relieved when her boyfriend arrives to collect her, but Hang-Gi suddenly walks over to her, intervenes in their conversation, and forcibly kisses her. Greatly angered, she demands an apology, thereby attracting a crowd, including three military recruits, who rough him up, but still he does not apologize. Instead, he decides to stalk her and arranges a scam: After she pockets a wallet with a wad of dough left in a bookstore, a man chases her, demands back considerably more than she took, and forces her to take out a loan from a loanshark with her face and body as collateral. Soon, she is kidnapped to a house of prostitution along a street of prostitutes until the watchful eyes of Hang-Gi and his fellow pimps, but her family and friends evidently abandon her. Hang-Gi continues to lust after her, tenderly watching behind a one-way mirror as her spirit is gradually broken and she sells her body more and more willingly. One of his fellow pimps, Myung-Soo (played by Choi Duk-Moon), however, falls for her and even arranges an escape for her, but Hang-Gi captures her and drives her to a beachfront, where they watch as a young girl deposits photographs in the sand and then commits suicide. However, one day a big-time gangster is released from prison; his racket is to tape sex encounters so that he can blackmail the johns, and now he wants to return to his former position. When he insists on having sex with Sun-Hwa, a scuffle ensues; Myung-Soo, who still has a crush on her, tries to throw him out, and Hang-Gi joins in, uttering his only two sentences in the script over the dead body of the blackmail racketeer. Violent revenge leads to more of the same, including a prison scene, where Hang-Gi decides that Sun-Hwa should be liberated from prostitution, even though she cannot step back into polite society after her reputation has been ruined. (Filmviewers are evidently supposed to infer that her parents and boyfriend did not try to rescue her when police, asked to find her as a missing person, reported that she was a prostitute.) The delicately romantic film score correctly predicts a Faustian ending for the two protagonists, not unlike Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (1990). Meanwhile, Korean society is indicted for the class structure and sexism that produces the most sordid of all organized crimes. MH
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