In the declaration of principles of what was his last film not released in Spain
'Human, Space, Time and Human'
, the Korean filmmaker
Kim Ki-duk
confessed that his intention was
"to stop hating the human being
.
"
The film was shown at the Berlinale at the same time that up to three actresses accused him of abuse and rape (in the end he was sentenced to pay a fine of $ 4,450 for assault).
The film was light years away from his best work, but ultimately and desperately, it could well be a
testament and even a summary.
The film tells the story of a group of people embarking on a pleasure cruise that, how could it be otherwise, brings out the worst in each one.
A glorious disaster through which, finally and despite everything, life makes its way.
But at what price.
At the price of simply living.
The concentration of brutality, perhaps obvious metaphors with a mystical air and the formal extravagance not without force make this work the best example and the worst work.
Everything at once.
Kim Ki-duk, whose death from Covid was announced yesterday (he was 59 years old),
always played to the limit.
And it was there that the director of '
The island', 'Spring, summer, autumn, winter ... and spring', 'Samaritan Girl'
or
'Hierro 3'
, perhaps his four best-known and most complete works, was forged not only a space in contemporary cinema but, hurriedly,
a legend.
For better and for worse.
His filmography was above all an obsession where the same common places, identical plots and, in a hurry, even the exact same replicated characters were repeated with an unusual constancy and clarity.
His cinema fed on
the dirt of the underworld, cruelty, blood, revenge, sex at the limit of all taboos
(always something more than just obsessed with prostitution) and, almost in the same proportion , by Kim Ki-duk himself as a matter of exploration.
He, like Bergman himself for example, made of himself "wood and ax"
: he was his own working instrument and the material of his research.
Following the success of his visceral cinema throughout the first decade of the century where he appeared with relish at the rate of one movie a year, he went bankrupt.
And in 2008 it was silent.
He reappeared in 2011 with two solipsist works solely focused on himself, on
'kimkiduity'
, let's call it that.
'
Amen
' was the first and, above all, the documentary '
Arirang
'.
The latter was, as he himself confessed,
the way to exhibit and publicize his own rebirth from the life before
to, where else, the later.
The film that won an award at Cannes was an exercise in cinema so withdrawn into itself that it ended up simply impenetrable and, once again, in its strangeness, it seemed perhaps
the only possible definition of the director.
Immediately afterwards, '
Pietà
'
arrived
and with him the
Golden Lion in Venice,
where he always received the best reviews and ended up being his place of reference.
And consecration.
Once again, that
frontal cinema
appeared in all its splendor,
built from the isolated consciousness of unique and marginal characters,
always on the border between silence and brutality;
between dream and reality.
Again, we saw an isolated character (a professional thug) devoted to discovering the frontier of his most intimate failure.
The story, inspired by the director said, in Michelangelo's sculpture of the same name, wanted to imagine the greatest pain, the most cruel loss. How could it be the revenge of a mother who has lost her child?
Is there any pain greater than the loss of a child?
With this premise, the director insisted over and over again on the keys to his usual cinema (even the plot was developed, as so many times, symmetrically).
Indeed,
Kim Ki-duk as Nietzsche's most ardent acolyte perhaps
only understood, and always understood, change as a way of returning to himself.
His concern was always the same: how to stop hating the human being.
And he made an effort.
Indefatigably.
With faith, without hope.
"Let us cruelly kill each other in our hearts to death. Even today, still controlling myself, I allow myself to be invaded by rage with a smile on my lips, I shudder with jealousy when I want to, I hate while I forgive, I tremble while I want to kill. Wait.
I'm going to commit suicide, I always remember you ", he
wrote in 'Arirang' precisely in a deferred and always present epitaph.
Going through his life is like walking through his cinema.
It could not be otherwise.
Kim Ki-duk came to the cinema late for someone born in 1960. After going through a thousand jobs, not all of them confessable (he was enlisted in the navy), one fine day, the chronicles tell us, he came across films like
'The Lovers de Pont Neuf ',
by Leos Carax.
He was already over 30 years old.
And there, perhaps, it all began.
After writing several scripts, his must came from the hand of '
Cocodrilo
' (1996), where everything that would come was already in the germ.
The brutal story of a group of homeless people living under a bridge anticipates the perfect communion of precise photography, between delicate and only broken, and brutal plot.
In '
La isla'
(2000), they say, he made a delicate and conspicuous critic vomit at the Mostra.
With
'Bad people
' (2001) he achieved the success he never wanted.
Thanks to '
Spring, summer, autumn, winter ... and spring' he
expanded his audience with a delicate and precise register in which violence ran inside in its something more than exquisite simplicity.
In '
Hierro 3
' it reached its most rounded moment.
The film deserving of the
Golden Spike and the award for best director in Venice,
with virtuosity and unusual precision, weaves together a portrait of identity that is as brilliant as it is disturbing.
And love too, perhaps a good reason not to hate the human being.
And so.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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