Don’t worry, this is not an art house, not a mysticism or a crime. This is a romantic melodrama, the female audience should like it. I can't judge a man.
Who is he? I think he's God. It could be everywhere. He could be somewhere you are. He is young and a very lonely God. He loves to pretend to be the wind, and he can also disappear. He's on his own. He likes to live in empty houses. He chooses different houses, but they are all empty, because if they are full, he will feel bad. One day he walks into a house and closes the door. He thinks he's alone, but God's director plays a funny game with him.
Who is she? I think she's a monster. She has a husband who loves her monster. Does she love her husband? I'd like to believe it, but probably not. I don't think monsters can love at all. Seriously, I can’t see the fire in her eyes. I wonder if she can live without love. I think not, because even the worst monster wants to love. And life is so hard that sometimes you just don’t want to live. These thoughts swirled in her empty heart. She was sleeping and dreaming, but someone came into her house.
Who invented all this? I think director Kim Ki-duk. He always makes up parables. Why should we be watching this parable? How is she better than others? To understand this, you need to watch all the parables of Kim Ki-duk by the date of their release. He told very harsh parables. In his parables, people killed each other, had abortions, put hooks in their mouths and in intimate places. It was very painful, but here came a completely different parable. About what? I think of love, but not God and monsters, but simple lonely people.
The great director broke the line with his finale. God is gone, the monster is gone. A real magic happened. I cried when she looked at her husband and saw him. He couldn't be here because he became human. I think he was helped by the next God or the power of love. I cried as she walked with her back against the wall and he emerged from the wall and hugged her from behind. A kiss broke everything and love filled this empty house with an empty heart. That's a strange parable. Don't live in empty houses.
Loneliness, emptiness, hopelessness and powerlessness are synonymous with the work of the director of this picture Kim Ki-duk. In almost all of his films, the themes of the sea and water are the red thread (the main characters of the film “Bad Boy” came to the sea shore; The crocodile lived under a bridge by the river; in the film “The Island” in general, all events unfold in floating houses on the water; in the film “Time”, the sculpture park, which goes under the water at low tide, was a symbol of the couple’s relationship. Important in the work of Kim Ki-duk are also distorted images of people: whether it is a broken mirror, a torn photo or methodically, a squared picture cut and reassembled. But the most stunning and memorable are the scenes of violence and cruelty that are found in almost all of the director’s early films, and thanks to which his films settle a heavy burden in the minds of viewers.
The main character of the film in the whole picture did not say a word, as if confirming the idea that in fact he does not exist. Its presence is only “felt” by people, but not felt; they do not see it, but feel it. It is transparent, although it casts a shadow. It doesn't exist. He is just a shell that lives a new life every day: yesterday he is a boxer, today he is a photographer, next night he is a golfer. He is a compilation of the lives of people in whose homes he spends the night stealing not material possessions, but a one-night stand. Of course, there is a special term for this – parasitism. It is not known what the main character does during the day, except pasting flyers and playing with a golf ball - it is only in the night.
Tired of an ordinary, noble, boring life, where from the interesting only beating of her husband and watering a flower, the main character is not even afraid of an uninvited guest, but on the contrary starts with him in an exciting, exciting, extreme journey through other people's apartments, adopting the habits of his guide, which he is very happy about. By the way, a similar introduction of the “good girl” to the way of existence of “dangerous, but so soft inside the young man” is used in the movie “Bad guy”. It is for the sake of this silent, suffering and pretty-looking girl (after all, he has the whole essence on her) that the hero is ready to become her savior, and then the invisible shadow of her husband, just to be together. Two lost, lonely, unnecessary souls understand each other and in absolute silence, silence, lick each other’s wounds.
The general atmosphere of decline, fatigue, despair and tension accompanies the whole film, although in comparison with other works of the author, this tape is not so heavy and depressing. However, in the end, in the bright light of the sun, it seems that the heroine has entered a state of delirium and shattered sanity, trying to escape from the oppressive reality, where her husband does not leave her, looking for details of her sexual relationship with a young criminal, and the unbearable existence will not become easy.
I liked the movie. Aesthetic picture, adjacent to cruelty, always impressed me in Korean films. The plot is a rethinking of a timeless picture about a beautiful prince, princess and dragon, where the princess is in the center of attention, despite her seeming secondaryness.
The princess often flashes in the film in the paintings. To the dragon and everyone he is connected to, it is a thing, a doll. Pay attention to how she is treated and what is said about her, this is especially easy, because there are few words, but they are precisely chosen. That's the beauty. One gets the feeling that no one, except her, sees that she is a human being and has a will. Such a princess does not wait for salvation, she waits for a situation where her choice is needed to feel alive. That's what I like most about this story.
It is difficult to call a man himself. It’s like it doesn’t exist, but at the same time, you know it has to exist. This is not a full-fledged character, it is a means of expression for the heroine. I guess everyone associates this character with a shadow, but whose one? When they are together, they merge in the literal and figurative sense, this is especially clearly shown in their common life. They both face brutality, they are not living their own lives, they are both locked up.
The two of them are one, and the silence between them only emphasizes this. They don't need to talk, it's clear. I always expect that from melodramas – a beautiful love story.
7 out of 10
The empty house of Kim Ki-duk contains the characteristic components of the work of the famous South Korean director: non-triviality, an alternative moral system, non-verbalism, violence, marginality, eroticism.
An unsettled young man named Tae Sook, while the owners are absent, enters vacant houses. There he lives for some time without denying himself anything, but at the same time does not steal anything and performs small chores around the house as a symbolic payment for living. The uninvited guest really likes to take trophy selfies against the background of photos of the hosts, as if inscribing himself on top of someone else's story. Thus, penetration into someone else’s home acts as a metaphor for assigning someone else’s identity – together with the individual space, the settler appropriates someone else’s life. The fact that he is a ghost with no identity of his own is indirectly confirmed by the fact that throughout the film, the settler will not utter a word. And also that at some point, realizing his essence, he will learn to be invisible. But it's not just a story about a settler who lives in an empty house. It is also the romantic story of how an uninvited guest, Tae Sook, rescues Princess Sun Wa from a castle, an expensive luxury home in which she is imprisoned by an evil dragon – her own husband. Fleeing domestic violence from a dragon husband, Sun Wah prefers to lead an adventurous lifestyle with his savior.
In an empty house, Kim Ki-duk, in addition to playing with space, also plays with imagination - if you are not visible, then you are not. If something cannot be seen, it does not exist. Thus, mastering the art of stealth becomes a kind of magical action. So, in an empty house, there are magical practices: disappearing from view as a way of renouncing one’s own identity and becoming a ghost, and appropriating someone else’s space as a way of assigning someone else’s identity. And of course, among other things, the “empty house” is a vivid visualized metaphor for the betrayal of an unhappy wife to a dragon husband with an invisible and elusive guy.
8 out of 10
Faces of Contemporary Asian Cinema: Kim Ki-duk (part 7)
“The Empty House” at first seems to the unsophisticated viewer almost a masterpiece and perhaps the best picture in the entire filmography of Kim Ki-duk. However, such an impression is deceptive – this is a very pretentious tape, although, fortunately, it saves the viewer from excessive violence (except for episodes with golf clubs), but in the dry residue leaving only a confused symphony of looks, gestures and hugs with a minimum of words. Undoubtedly, Kim Ki-duk is a master of wordless cinema (the film “Spring, Summer, Autumn...” proved this), at the same time, the complete purification of the narrative from acute conflicts and severe collisions leads to distillation of the dramaturgy, the diet of the plot, created as if for sensitive hipsters, and not for the experienced viewer.
The “empty house” is pretentious due to its false ambiguity, bloated metaphors (like a kiss on the shoulder of another person or the invisibility of the hero to everyone except the girl in love with him), there is an effect of a kind of pop poetry in the manner of Coelho or Murakami, when the relations of the sexes are served in the space of common, even vulgar in their downtime symbols. Kim Ki-duk here, like Coelho and Murakami, uses only what is generally easy to read by the average recipient, the director is in every possible way afraid to complicate the metaphor of the film text, so that it, God forbid, does not become opaque to the viewer. The result is in all senses of the word public film, the standard of arthouse zero, as well as the tapes of Trier or Almadovar of these years: nothing complicated, dark, ambiguous.
With this tape, Kim Ki-duk proves that he can be not only a film-extremist, shocking the audience, but also a generally understood philosopher with a lean face, broadcasting to everyone the understandable truths that have come to the people because of its outdated habit: love is eternal, it conquers everything, nothing and everything in the same spirit can break it. And the main thing (nonsense for this director) is that violence has no place in it, which means that Kim Ki-duk shoots for everyone, first of all for young bourgeois, who are once again pleased to see the inviolability of their aesthetic and ethical criteria, because sooner or later even the most radical artists begin to profess them.
It's even better than 'Spring, summer, autumn. . ?
Unique style. Lucky soundtrack. A very deep approach to the artistic embodiment of thought. It is one of the few films that has a strong idea.
In English, it is called 3-Iron, which means Iron & #39; Three' (about a non-existent golf club).
The film amazes with a large number of non-standard solutions and scenario twists. It is almost impossible to guess what will happen next, or even how this scene will end. It looks fascinating. Leaves a pleasant aftertaste. A little sad, but at the same time a sense of lightness.
A rare picture of an unrecognized, and really undecorated master of art house.
This film opened up the space of Korean cinema for me. The bizarre fusion of aesthetics, meditativeness and cruelty, set in the first frames, left a strange impression. There was no rejection, although there was no acceptance at first. Only gradually it became clear that logical clues scattered around the work and in themselves quite visible and convex, it is possible to read and interpret one way or another.
We see how the hero from day to day invades other people’s homes left unattended by the owners (some go on vacation, some on a business trip). He does the most everyday things in these apartments: he washes things, digs in the refrigerator, watches TV. He lives his own life at the same time and not his own, because his identical life is diversified by the location of rooms in the house, furniture, even a set of food left behind. It seems as if he briefly reincarnates into the owner of the house and partly establishes his own rules in it. The melody he plays in every home speaks to that. And in any interior, he always takes a selfie. It's like a ritual.
He's not too kind. He is even cruel, this cruelty lives in him, carefully concealed. In my opinion, from the very beginning (the shocking situation with the gun) his indifference to people, complete indifference to their fates was emphasized. An addiction to playing iron golf clubs gives him away (Sung-hwa's husband also plays golf). Every time violence is associated with golf. The very whistling sharp sound, breaking the silence, sounds repulsive, it symbolizes anger, suffering. But the hero is very fond of this game, and only when a woman appears in his life, tied to him (ball and thread, connection), he begins to realize the consequences of his aggression, becomes more human and tormented by remorse (the situation with a girl in a car is quite artificial by the way). Again and again, the recurring moment - Son-hwa gets in the way of the ball, does not allow him to hit. Tae-sook takes revenge, but his revenge is finite. It doesn't become his way of life.
At the same time, the hero is strangely attached to the dwellings in which he moves. He takes care of them, takes care of plants, fixes things. People are not attracted to him, but their abandoned homes need care and Tae-seok takes care of them. Again, attachment to houses makes him come back to appreciate their owners, to make sure people are worthy of their homes. In human form, he either does not encounter people, or meets with their negative manifestations - anger, suspicion. He wants to see them as they really are. He does not like the living, but he is very respectful of the dead. All this suggests that Tae-seok originally belongs to the spirit world, it is a kind of spirit of the hearth. In no house does he linger, leaving behind harmless but frightening footprints. He makes the return journey, which he began from the moment he met Son-hwa and ended in prison, only in a different form.
The end of the film is like casting a transparent veil on reality. Reality emerges through it, but something else, vaguely discernible, layers upon it. And reality itself becomes a little more shaky. In the thinnest plane of this overlap, the combination of layers and are the heroes. And, of course, silence. I have never seen a more harmonious film in terms of sound. The main characters are silent with each other - and this is a sign of absolute understanding. Song-hwa is silent in response to the words of her husband - and this is a sign of absolute misunderstanding. At the end, Son-hwa begins to speak, and this is a sign of the new time. I get it. Only the rites performed in Tae-sook prison are incomprehensible. It's probably mythology. The eye on the palm, the hands-wings are probably images that go back to antiquity. The line between reality and the word “fantasy” is very thin here and becomes visible closer to the finale. And it's beautiful.
Empty houses are a symbol of bodies without souls. When the house sleeps, that is, a person sleeps, in his subconscious the soul is cleansed of daytime fatigue. A person wakes up with the hope that this day will go well, he will do what he intended, will become better. But no, he's living hypocrisy again.
Shooting a bullet is the only way to stop this fight of conscience.
The main character, Tae-suk, like a conscience, travels through empty houses while the soul sleeps. The protagonist is like a soul that reincarnates into different bodies.
Once the soul did not know that it had not wandered into an empty body. The other soul was unhappy and saw freedom in the new soul. She didn't care who that soul was, she wanted to get out of the cage. Souls have found harmony. Together they traveled through the bodies.
They saw red gloves as an omen of something terrible, a conflict.
We separated the shower by putting one of them in a cage. In the cage, she learned to be a shadow. Let the soul out. The soul wandered through its former bodies to see the memory of its half.
A person wandering through empty houses is like a person who communicates with people, tries to guide them to the true path, but cannot, because they are stale and mired in lies.
The main character, the soul, now communicates with the soul of Tae-suk, as if with a shadow and a ghost. It's like she's communicating with a dream come true. She's happy now.
Do you dream? Do you swim through the swing without passengers, walking hand in hand with the shadow? Are you asleep or awake?
For beauty Kim Ki-duk is famous for making beautiful films. Beautiful not only visually, but also plot. They have an attractive mystical atmosphere. This film is attractive, beautiful, atmospheric. But in pursuit of this beauty, or rather for one beautiful scene at the end, the director threw away the logic of the narrative, which makes the film seem beautiful, but empty and stretched author crafts. The plot tells us about a guy who lives in the homes of people who have left for a while. Naturally, he does not ask permission from them and just breaks the locks like a robber. At the same time, the director repeatedly tells us that this is a good guy – he fixes broken things, then saves a girl from being beaten by her husband. By the way, the girl then falls in love with him and goes to wander to other people's homes with him. The plot is quite unusual, but in order to make it even more unusual, the director inserts another feature - the characters do not talk. Not with each other or anyone else. In the end, this will lead to one very beautiful scene, but before that throughout the film leads only to a lot of absurdities, inconsistencies and plot holes. Why don't heroes talk? Are they mute? Nope. Are they social phobias? Not either. Are they autistic? Not really. So what's the reason? It's just the director wanted it. I wanted to create a beautiful scene at the end and built an extremely illogical plot for an hour and a half. Actually, the whole plot, all the problems of the characters arise from the fact that they do not say and cannot explain anything to others. The husband beats his wife — it seems to be a bad person, but he is in this situation is much more empathetic than his wife — she does not talk to him at all and ignores his presence. The hero is accused of a murder he didn't commit - so why not tell his version of what happened? Especially since he has a witness. But no. The director needs to build a beautiful scene at the end, and therefore the characters will do stupid things without any motivation, just because. The scene at the end, for which everything happened, and in general the ending is beautiful. It has an atmosphere, there is beauty – visual and not only. There is a mystery that must remain unsolved, there is philosophy and references to religious themes. But is the ending worth all the illogical mud that came before it? Tough question. The only thing is that this is not the best film in the career of a director. 6 out of 10 Original
Kim Ki-duk is a filmmaker whose films express the helplessness, cruelty and injustice of society and the human soul. Not surprisingly, many people know Kim Ki-duk for his brutal and heartbreaking works as Pieta, Island and Samaritan. But the "Empty House" seems to stand apart from these tapes. Here, the director managed to move into something more metaphysical and beyond the human mind. Heroes, both lost in this world where they have no place, both with their own personal misfortune, are one final and component in this universe, for therefore they are both silent. They cannot speak because words will mean nothing. Empty houses express what is going on inside. They are lonely, and only in each other they find the balance and meaning that can not be found in an empty house. But isn't it a dream? What if the understanding and feelings between the characters are just an illusion? One way or another, a person lives, dreaming of something better and happier for his soul. Not finding happiness in their lives, the main characters give in to the illusions in which they have each other.
To understand the philosophical subtext of the film, you need to move away from the Western worldview and imbue the national Korean vision of the world. We need to renounce publicity, from exposing ourselves to the world, from phrases: I watched the film, did not understand anything, but I consider it my duty to declare that this is an art house. It is necessary to abandon Western individualism and Russian collectivism, to accept and feel that, being at home alone, we are surrounded by an innumerable world of living beings, spirits, demons, who live as equally in this physical world as we do, walk, eat and engage in our own development or degradation. These are not primitive Western horror movies, when there is a battle for your home with otherworldly evil spirits, this is a real life in which we can see the spirits and they see us. And that's our problem, not the problem of spirits, that we don't see them, they're all right. Pananimism, pandemonism, and also complicated by a bizarre mixture of shamanism and the idea of retribution of late Buddhism and Christianity. The problem is that the Koreans themselves have moved away from this worldview. They stopped seeing spirits, and shamans became mere soothsayers. The world has become an empty home, the world has become filled with everyday cruelty, people have stopped working with their hands, spiritualizing things, the mechanical world has cast out spirits and is doomed to live in empty solitude, and violence, instilling a sense of superiority is the only way people exist in this world. The people themselves have become empty lonely homes, cruel and miserable. Departure from tradition, from the life of ancestors is one of the terrible accusations for the Oriental person. That's what Kim Ki-Duk's movie is about.
Two characters are able to see spirits, see what everyone else, including the screened viewer, considers illusory. They are not spirits, they are ordinary people living as their ancestors lived. Tae-suk graduated from college, Sun-hwa is a poor girl married to a rich man. But time has changed for them, Sun-Hwa has forgotten herself, suffers from the hopelessness of marriage (forget ridiculous jokes from the other world of the West: she is guilty, frozen, or run to her parents), from the violence of her husband; Tae-Suk, on the contrary, is engaged in healing, he heals time, reverses it. He enters unhappy houses (there will be 7 houses in total, and only one of them will be happy) and revives the spirits. He animates the spirit world by his hands, by manual labor: broken things, disorder in the house, unwatered plants - evidence that the house will be abandoned, that spirits do not live in this house, this house is empty and dead, like its inhabitants. Tae-suk is a man, but he is equal to the spirit and behaves like a spirit, because there is no essential difference between spirits and man. A constant motif is viewing photos of the nominal owners of the apartment and selfies against the background of their photos or interior. Tae-suk becomes an equal resident of other people’s empty houses, and the houses will now be alive.
Tae-Suk makes the mistake of doubting and retreating twice during the film, but still violates the Eastern principle of non-interference. The first is that he takes someone else’s wife with him, committing violence against her husband, the second time a caring son burys someone else’s father. He used violence for the first time, and violence comes back to him. Golf (and the Chinese are still convinced that they taught the medieval Scots this game), or rather the Iron N3, the stick, the most lethal of the Irons, is an allegory of violence. Let's remember the first shots of the movie. Remember, to protect themselves from spirits, the characters of the film are armed with irons. Tae-Suk has embarked on the path of violence, he has known violence by interfering in the fate of someone else’s home, and is delighted with it, bewitched by it, the foundation of the modern world. And he'll be a cruel demon in the future, like most Korean spirits, if it weren't for Sun-hwa. This girl is the personification of love, and she teaches the hero to love, as he teaches her to animate the spirit world. That is why she stands in the way of frightening people with the wave of an iron, and when she departs, the violence with the idea of retribution bursts into life: Tae-Suk becomes a murderer and begins a new path, the path of retribution. This is not exactly a Christian or Buddhist interpretation: violence is acceptable in this world, but it must be inextricably linked to the idea of mirror retribution. There was a very interesting symbolic version here that the golf ball is Tae-Suk itself, and the string is Sun-Hwa. Kim Ki-duk, in my opinion, is clear enough and allegorical to go into abstruse and false symbolic interpretations, otherwise there would always be four balls, and he deals with the policeman with five strokes. All the characters of the film receive a mirror retribution, and Tae-Suk is no exception.
Like ancient ancestors, the hero goes through the path of initiation, shamanic rites, he does not just see objects invisible to devastated people, he learns to see 360 degrees. And at the end of the three stages of initiation (in Korea, a shaman capable of becoming a spirit must undergo three such rites), Tae-Suk can enter the world of spirits hidden to people, moreover, he can become an invisible instrument of retribution. This is how he punishes a guard and a police officer who claims to be important. He visits the houses he has animated and people feel him. Some, like the boxer, the photographer, the husband of Sun-Hwa, are frightened, others are surprised, like in the house of lovers, where the exhausted Sun-Hwa went to rest, but in any case this means that the house is alive, and its inhabitants can become like ancestors who have been forgotten, like an old man left by children to die of cancer. And now Tae-Suk can only be seen with the back, and the scales on which both heroes stood show 0, although in broken form they add another 50 kilos. It’s an allegory: Heroes have become spirits, but they are physically real, exist on a par with beings we don’t see. And the question is, will Soon-Hwa stay with her husband or not? — sounds again in Western individualistic, love and peace have now been restored in the house, and the eyes of husband and wife glow with happiness, and spirits live in the house — is not this the meaning of life?
It is impossible to constantly fight enemies from without or demons from within. But especially loneliness. One way or another, the forces are once exhausted, and the impulse fades away, like a fire under a pulsating inclement sky - here it comes, returns from the subconscious masra, like an old mistress who broke into the house, reminding all existence of the past and framing her shadow today. And then you inadvertently give up, silently fall into the familiar fragile embrace, into this abyss of emptiness and the light of languid thoughts, into the weightlessness of loneliness, which in an instant becomes something dear and close. It fills the harassing soul, offering different games of life, sometimes strange, sometimes incomprehensible, just like with Tae-sook, who pastes advertising brochures on random doors to later return and calculate the empty houses that saved the ad. Climbing into them, he does not steal anything, on the contrary, he does useful work: he washes dishes, washes laundry, repairs broken things. Alien walls fill the orphaned corners of his soul. Isn’t this what happens to Kim Ki-duk himself, tired of fighting from film to film with insensitivity, longing, pain, loneliness, whatever it is, and silently surrendering himself entirely to these feelings? Sad, but unusually tender.
Everyone has their own form of communication: Linklater collects a diorama of impressions and random encounters, Malik catches the sunshine of symbolism, Scorsese through the “evil streets” opens up life from a new angle, Trier cynically explores human facets, however, sometimes through the prism of viciousness, and Kar-Wai through the cigarette smoke of the past tries to catch a love mood, at least for a moment. Everyone wants something, wants to speak out—some straight, some florid—so as to be remembered, to capture the moment of eternity and to perpetuate it in incorruptibility. Kim Ki-duk also has his own style of cinematic communication: he “tells” silently. Moreover, it is more beautiful than any words, because the latter are often hollow, they do not have specificity and sincerity, at least the one that the Korean expresses with views, touches, sighs, the interrelationship of human internal mechanisms. In another way, he does not know, such is his rumor, but it is in the “Empty House” that silence takes its final and perfect form. Tae-suk is constantly silent, even when in one of the houses he notices Sung-hwa, suffering from beatings of her husband, who is unhappy in marriage and, oddly enough, is also silent. However, this will not prevent him from falling in love with her, and even avenge her scumbag wife. Two lost souls in the backwaters, are words necessary? Two solitudes, driven by adjacent orbitals, which sometimes touch. The silence denotes the fullness of their mutual understanding, therefore they will silently and platonically examine each other, together change one apartment after another, wander, like the lonely “Pilgrims” of Brodsky, “peace and grief past.”
But behind the veil of their sublunar cover was a void - shunyata, the knowledge of which is paramount both for Buddhism and for Kim Ki-duk himself. You can try to fill it with trying on someone else’s life, photographing yourself against the background of other people’s portraits as a reminder that you too are part of this world, or repairing other people’s objects as a relief from the malfunction of your own life, and even revenge with golf balls and releasing hidden pain in the same way. Ultimately, however, shunyata can only be understood through meditation, destroying the normal self-understanding. Tae-sook gradually begins to understand this: first he makes his cellmates see a non-existent golf ball, and then he dissolves himself in the void, blurring the lines between the two worlds. But nothing disappears without a trace, something always remains, in someone's memory or dreams. “As an emptiness, look at the world,” says the Buddha, “and Kim looks at it, learns with each film, and so do his characters.” While others conquered the cinematic Olympus, he confidently but slowly approached it, having managed to discover something otherworldly, Zen and transcendental in his work. Or maybe it's empty, incomprehensible.
Something like frustration or a mirage is born by the end of the film. It is difficult for a Korean to tell whether reality or dream is the world we live in. Is it possible to find a simple and correct answer to this question? No one knows for sure: Einstein will connect it to consciousness, Welsh will talk about insanity again, and Freud will confuse it more. It is not easy to say who Kim Ki-duk is. A misanthrope who hides his essence under the mask of karma? A recluse trying to paint his loneliness with illusions? A pathological person who talks about his pain? The devil who lowers his heroes to the bottom of torment and torment? The Lord lifts them to the heights of the universe, equating them with eternal images of love and loneliness? The latter is particularly disturbed by his cadres, especially in The Empty House, where loneliness does not look like punishment, it is rather salvation and a kind of equilibrium between two worlds, prosaic and otherworldly, between Sun-hwa and Tae-suk. She remembered his image so much that she could see him in the void and even touch him or kiss him. They are shadows of solitude, locked in themselves, in each other. Their world has become semi-ghost, they have made it so by connecting in the spiritual dimension. Wasn't that kind of love for Beatrice that Dante sang about? Kim Ki-duk went beyond the limits of reason, finding himself outside time and space, where souls are intertwined, and mortal bodies smolder in their despair. Again, he confused, discouraged and shocked, leaving a painful aftertaste, as if something was stuck inside, something exciting, something pleasant. Tell me, Kim, how do you do that? Although don't say, don't, keep it a secret or it will lose its magic. Hide it deep down and save it. For me, for me. Please...
You look upon this world as empty. If you destroy the ordinary understanding of yourself, you will fight death. The Lord of Death will not see him who sees the world in this way. —Sutta-nipata, verse 1118
The young woman was alone in a luxurious quiet mansion. Sadist husband after another quarrel went on a business trip, leaving on the face of the beautiful wife abrasions and bruises. Clenching into a pitiful lump, like a clot of pain, she froze against the wall. Time went by its unhurried turn, and the woman did not leave her place. There was an abyss in her soul. There is nothing left in this world to interest her. Life has become a source of endless torment. And suddenly, using a key key, an unknown young man entered the quiet house. Thief? But instead of rummaging through closets in search of money and valuables, the strange guy collected and washed dirty laundry by hand, repaired broken things, and then bought out and blithely went to rest in the bedroom. He clearly did not expect to meet a mistress in an empty house almost as silent and quiet as himself.
Two mysterious lonely souls, touching, felt a kinship. Exalted Arab-African song wove a pattern of invisible connections between them. A loose skirt and a simple pink jacket became an outfit for the exhausted princess. The golf club turned into a favorite and very dangerous weapon of retribution. A sports bike is a faithful knightly horse, taking lovers away from the despot of her husband. Bright advertisements glued over the door locks - signs of a free quiet shelter. And other people's homes - a source of new sensations, a place of solitude and joy of knowing each other. The house is another human shell. The masters are his soul. And every house, whether it is a modest apartment or a luxurious mansion with a garden, bears the imprints of the inner world, desires and interests of the people inhabiting it. One is furnished with exquisite taste. The other is literally screaming about his absence. The boxer says everything about sport and strength. The photographer’s walls are covered with portraits of beautiful naked people. In the last refuge of the old man, shabby doors and wallpaper lagging behind the wall seem to have become decrepit together with the owner.
“Empty house”, aka “Golf club N 3” – one of the most unusually cute and kind creations of the master, created during the peak of his talent. A light and at the same time salty sad poetic parable. Strange, but piercingly tender romance. Love without words. The aesthetic of lack of colorfulness and intentional beauty. Naive naturalism in detail combined with the metaphorical nature of events and the surreal nature of bizarre images. Of course, Kim Ki-duk cannot do without depicting physical violence, helpless victims, generously shed blood and inhumane acts of villains. But this cruelty recedes into the background amid the overwhelming emotional flow. Words are superfluous to convey feelings. You need the power of sight and the thrill of touch. They will create a silent poem, fill the space with the magic of warmth and the feeling of closeness of a soulmate, the only close and vital in all the white light of the soul.
But sometimes, in order to earn the opportunity to be together, you have to find the ability and strength to transcend the boundaries of ordinary reality and make the impossible possible. From early childhood, from day to day, society gradually forms in everyone rules, attitudes, stereotypes, behavior patterns, everything that makes us normal participants in society with its place and role in it. But sometimes there are other people who are able to look into the eyes of emptiness. Some are born with a strong immunity to stereotypes. Others become so because of a life turned into a cycle of suffering. These others, like the heroes of Empty House, reject the conventional version of reality. It is an illusion that distorts the mirror. No wonder the film has so many reflections (in mirrors, window windows, muddy water puddles) and photos, which are not so much a genuine image as an author's view of what he saw.
If the illusory veil is removed, the void (Shunyata) in the sense in which Buddhists understand it will open. Emptiness is not the absence, but the true nature of things and of the inner self. No wonder the hero encourages his cellmates to see the missing golf ball, and then he himself is likened to a silently sliding shadow disappearing from the field of view of strangers and enemies. Open your eyes! Clear your eyes of the layers of the mind. Look beyond, beyond, and beyond the ordinary to understand the mysterious, to know the unknown, and to make the impossible possible. Perhaps even death can be overcome.
Kim Ki-duk belongs to the still truly rare category of modern Korean directors, who should not heal the bleeding gut of a long history. The more understandable becomes the undisguised rejection of the director in the homeland, who is more a philosopher than a reflective historiographer, the movements of the human soul of the director are much more exciting than the movements on the rough surface of life – social, economic, political; the otherness of all his film heroes can be considered marginality, but in this way the basic part of the author’s subsenses, based on which it is difficult to call Kim Ki-Duk a household director, the social rejection of most of the director’s heroes is due only to the fact that they are not connected with their reality.
The film "Empty House" - one of the most poetic films of the Korean - does not seem, unlike his other films, an illustration to the famous phrase of F. Scott Fitzgerald "Describe the extreme as if we are talking about the ordinary - this is the first rule of the art of prose", which undoubtedly adequately fell on the full of vital violence of the film director. In this story of a man and a woman who found each other and in each other, the sinister beauty of violence was replaced by simply beauty and harmony, without any underlying pathology of relations, as if Kim Ki-duk had never before had an abnormal “Island” or sophisticated discourses of the Coast Guard consciousness. The inviolability and at the same time the fragility of the love of the main characters is contrasted with the universal emptiness of the world in which they live; any words are devalued, in the end, according to the director, any individual is the same empty house that will only be filled with the light of life again when there is some common sense in it, the notorious understanding of why he lives and for whom, for it is good only to die alone, to live in this way - luxury is unacceptable.
In the center of the vicious circle of the usual author’s problems is a person, and only he, who often experiences moments of total denial of the previously inherent course of being, and too often the characters of Kim Ki-duk are deprived of any right to explain their own background: “Crocodile”, “Island”, “Address unknown”, “Real fiction”, in the end, the late “Pieta” or rhyming theme of overcoming impersonal existence, the picture “Empty House”. It is noteworthy that in this picture the impersonal processes of human existence are shown without explicitly pedaling all the accompanying horrors of urbanism. The big city seems literally frozen, frozen and almost dead. From the space of the film mystically removed all the noise, oh, all that devilish hundred voices, dissolving a person in itself. The director focuses very specifically on only two main characters and a few minor ones, quite often enclosing the characters in spatial lacunae – avoiding the abundance of close-ups, but at the same time achieving a sense of constant inexhaustible freedom that Tae-suk and Sun-hwa possess.
The young man Te-sook, meanwhile, can reasonably be called a man without a past. Entering other people’s homes, which, despite the abandonment and desolation, still continue to keep the trace of their masters, Te-suk in general, without stealing anything material, takes from each new home a significant part of his history, assigns to himself, even by the very fact of photographing himself against the background of other people’s family portraits, a significant part of someone else’s being, because he has no one behind him. However, even this appropriation is of a fundamentally short nature, it seems that having put on someone else’s life, having penetrated into it on a metaphysical level, Tae-suk will lose his faltering individuality, therefore he is more attracted by the knowledge of a new place than the desire to determine his true identity. This imperceptible, ghostly existence, sealed in mute, depressing languagelessness, sufficiently coincides with the endless rhythm of life of the metropolis, it seems fused with these landscapes of neon emptiness, filled in turn with incomprehensible polyphony. His existence is borderline, but only thanks to Sun-hwa he chooses not destructiveness, but constructiveness, non-being he prefers conscious being and going beyond the established path. Is that death?! Almost. This is beyond any death or life: the real finding of oneself, throwing off the shackles of the fleshly incarnation with its phantom pains and turning into everything and nothing, into a glare and shadow on the surface of the mirror, into which Sun-hwa will look and finally see himself, too, and not the husband.
The sun goes to the west, but to be born again, rushes to the east.
In my perception, the film “Empty House” is composed of two parts.
In the first part it was quite understandable story: yes, not quite ordinary, very quiet, with strange characters, but if you try, everything can be explained quite easily. The young man for some reason has departed from the normal way of life, he has no home, he spends the night in randomly chosen empty apartments or houses. You can imagine why this happened, name several reasons and choose one that you like best.
A tyrant husband and a beautiful young wife are also understandable. And it was immediately possible to guess how the meeting of an illegal tenant and a sad woman would end.
The police and the prison, and all the cruelty associated with them, is a logical continuation of the plot in which people illegally enter into someone else’s private property. When the couple got arrested and the muzzle started, I thought, ‘Well, that’s always the case. Everything is the same, just like us.
And as soon as I thought about it, the second part began, filled with puzzles to my mind. How can you learn from your jailer? Why should you teach your prisoner? Is it really possible to hide behind the enemy without him noticing you? Why would you let a stranger into your house just sleep?
Perhaps the golf club is the most mysterious detail of the film. But it appears in the first, “understandable” part. In my opinion, it symbolizes the Western influence on Eastern culture: something beautiful, prestigious, but dangerous (even deadly).
The Empty House finale puzzled me personally. It seemed to me that Tae-sook had returned to Sun-hwa only in her imagination. That she simply combined the image of a tyrant and the image of a loved one, and said to the already united image that she loved him.
11 out of 10
If you ask what the movie is about, you can simply answer about love. But if you think about it, we come to the conclusion that the film is about loneliness. A young man who has nothing but a motorcycle. He lives in different houses, the owners of which do not suspect that in their absence there is a person in their house. The main character is Tae-sook, he does not enter the house for the purpose of robbery. . It seems to me that this is how he escapes from loneliness. Tae-sook helps the housekeepers. And then one day he goes into another house where the girl lives. At first he doesn't notice her, but then their eyes meet. . . Sun Wah's girl. She has a fiancé on whom she is totally dependent and with whom she is not happy. This girl who has a chic house and a groom is inherently single. It should be noted that throughout the film, the main characters are silent, from the beginning of the viewer it stresses, and then we understand what it is for. This is what distinguishes them from others, if we are divided into halves in this world, then they find each other. Further, the action of the film develops rapidly, there will be everything: a corpse, and arrest, and rescue, and the finale will not be traditional.
Even though the film is made without any effects, it is exciting. It's very beautifully shot, it's certainly very poetic. Watching it is like reading a good book. You won't regret it.
I spent a lot of time watching this movie because I usually need time to adjust to the rhythm of Asian cinema. Oriental films are usually very slow, smooth.
I was immediately interested in the description of the film and intrigued by the trailer. The main characters are played by beautiful actors and play well. Their interaction is devoid of verbal dialogue, but they do not need words. They understand each other with one eye, one gesture. They are soul mates.
An unusual story of an unusual relationship. Unusual lifestyle of the main character, wandering from one strange house to another, and how easily accepts all this heroine.
In the end, it was nice to see how the girl became emboldened and began to respond to her husband’s aggression with aggression, not patience. The ending was good. The girl was so happy when the loved one was right behind her husband. He became invisible to all, remaining in the sight of only her.
The film is an aesthetic. The aesthetics of feelings and relationships. I can safely give this film the highest score and recommend to everyone who likes this movie.
10 out of 10
The main character leads an unusual way of life - he settles in temporarily empty houses and without any malicious intent lives in them as the owner. He cleans, does laundry, takes a bath and cooks dinner. He doesn’t steal anything, but leaves little funny surprises—twisting scales, clocks, etc.—to stun the hosts when they return.
One day he, living in another house, stumbles upon a silent girl who seems not to mind that a stranger has settled with her. As he learns later, she suffers from an unhappy marriage and physical abuse by her husband. One day, a girl abandons everything and adopts the lifestyle of her new friend.
A truly amazing Asian film that evokes only positive emotions! Despite the fact that it is a drama, there is no negative residue from watching. It depicts a completely new and unusual way of life and all its charm – new homes, new people, new travel and new emotions.
The film is rather silent - almost no dialogue, which makes it more valuable for visual viewing. Here it does not matter what the characters say - everything is clear and without words . By the way, there are pleasant, funny moments - this is not the movie, when watching which is worth crying for 1.5 hours.
In the second part, when the main character develops certain physical abilities ( becomes a kind of modernized version of Japanese ninja), the film turns into an even more Asian . Everything in the spirit of the genre - physical exercises, Asian roofs, the atmosphere of houses. Less modern and more traditional, which is very pleasing.
Also a great pleasure delivers music, which very successfully fits into this film.
The film with meaning, quality (and most importantly, "real") made leaves a pleasant feeling of peace. He does not pretend to be a genius, but once again demonstrates all the charm and beauty of the subtle Asian world.
Personally, my advice is to watch at night, just before bedtime, like many Asian films. Then you will feel much better what the director wanted to convey to you.
9 out of 10
"Empty House" is a film of recognition, cinema silence, a story of complete oblivion and silence. This unusual film immediately plunges into its mysterious and attractive atmosphere of calm and deep thinking. This film is exceptional. It is pure and gentle, for those who know how to feel. This picture has nothing to compare, it is beautiful.
We see the story of a young motorcyclist who travels around the country and lives in homes where the owners are absent for a certain period of time. He's not stealing anything, just using the house while the owners are away. One day a guy sleeps in a respectable house, I think nobody's home, but there was a woman sitting in the closet. We see their amazing history of relationships, feelings and a deep story in which everything was said without words.
Korean actors Jae Hee and Lee Seung-yeon composed a beautiful duet in this drama. She was excited. There was so much depth, feeling and emotion in their eyes that words were really unnecessary. Director Kim Ki-duk created something unusual and hypnotic. I will never forget this movie. He's beautiful. I also want to turn to calm, euphoric music. This song, which played all the time in the film, I really liked, and I found it and downloaded it. The story of a stranger and a woman with sad eyes truly charms and carries away into something unusual and pure.
Empty House is a 2004 South Korean drama directed by Kim Ki-duk. The film is much deeper than it seems at first glance. I love it and would recommend it.
The house is an imprint of the personality of its owner, a cast of his life with successes and disappointments, an advertising leaflet of desired achievements. Here is a standard family - with an unremarkable apartment, except that the ceremonial portrait broadcasts diverse joy, from a sincerely open smile in a child to frankly tortured from his father. Here is a happy family, which does not need to demonstrate anything: air is soaked in love, walls are fastened, satin pillows are stuffed, the greenery of a small courtyard rustles about it and fish in the pool are silent. But the family is unhappy: the husbandly wealth proudly declares itself with expensive golf accessories and pseudo-antique statues (clearly superfluous in the indicative eastern garden), and the second half wanders around the house in a restless shadow, as if only half alive - the half that is ragged from bruises and abrasions, but almost has no voice. Tae-sook also has no voice, and at the same time at home: he sleeps in empty apartments while the owners are absent - as if invisibly leaves a mark on someone else's life or, conversely, creates a fiction of his own life. He is none of those who will pass by and immediately forget, but somehow Sun-hwa left with him, and now the two shadows wander together, filling the emptiness of other people's homes with a sonorous silence.
Kim Ki-duk is a real artist, only if he used to paint, now he shoots them on film. That is why beauty and patterned ornament of stopped moments occur in his works and piecework, but guessing the meanings is like simultaneously searching for black cats in bamboo thickets and water in the Pacific Ocean. Each ribbon is a personified metaphor, an X-ray of a thought-image, a tear of God in amber; they cannot be taken literally, because the plots are not viable, the characters never existed, the laws of physics are embodied in a piano score. “The Empty House” was invented when the director removed the advertising flyer from the door handle, the undeciphered silence of the characters is one of the elements of the corporate style, well, and the harsh oriental metaphysics he apparently has in his blood. The logic of the narrative constantly contradicts the logic of the usual, but it is quite natural for Kim that the girl leaves with an unfamiliar guy who broke into her house, repaired the scales and washed things, because she leaves her husband, who treated her as the same thing, once bought profitably, and now washed to the soul holes by scandals and nagging. It is not at all strange that one day she returns to a happy house, where she just felt good - and the host does not drive away the guest, but allows you to quietly fall asleep on satin pillows. It is expected to be symbolic that Tae-suk steals nothing in his travels, and in return for the food and shelter he repairs things, as if correcting the breakdown in someone else’s life; but at the same time he carries with him the stick of the spouse of Sun-hwa, a sign of his strength, power and wealth, proving that without them he will remain nothing, as empty as his house. It is fascinating how Tae-sook learns to be invisible to others, and it is absolutely beautiful how he becomes so that he is always close to his beloved.
It must be a film about alienation. About the inconspicuous existence of hundreds of residents of thousands of cities, indistinguishable in the crowd, not remembered at work, random passers-by, whose parallels of fate never crossed in the perpendicular world. Especially in Asia, where there are a lot of people, especially in Korea, where, without being officially represented, they do not exist for each other. Of course, this is a film about loneliness. About emotionally empty houses, about the “silent” loved ones that we, immersed in ourselves, do not hear or do not want to hear, about the desire to escape to the big world, where small we are lost even more. Maybe it's a love movie. About the one that does not need words to become truly native, which has no boundaries in the form of walls and marriage bonds, which does not cast shadows and gives weightless “zero” on the scales. This is definitely a film about balance. About retribution for crimes, even accidental, about the return of debts, even paid, about retribution for evil and for good, about internal harmony as an antidote to external disharmony, about the fact that peace, comfort, peace etcetera should reign in the house, then the house will be filled with happiness, albeit ghostly, half-hearted, for the elect. Of course, this is a film about emptiness. The inner, aching emptiness of each person, like a vessel filled with unfulfilled fantasies, phantoms of feelings, desires and fears. But it's actually a movie about the Great Void. About the Buddhist shunyata shunyata - the emptiness of emptiness, the words about which are as meaningless as attempts to embrace the immense. A liberating, delightfully pure emptiness that frees us from the mud of everyday life, from the senselessness of suffering, from the power of money, feelings, delusions, and other shackles of reality that keep us from knowing the truth and flying happy.
A prisoner in Tae-suk prison, mastering esoteric practices, not only mimics the surrounding space, he turns it inside out and himself becomes a void, the meaning of which is enlightenment, higher wisdom, nirvana. Nothingness, zero. The invisible in life became the invisible authentic, the outsider the otherworldly, the metaphor closed in the system, the two shadows merged into one, yin and yang balanced the world on a mystical scale. The guy and the girl are connected in the spiritual dimension, which, of course, is much more important than temporary physical intimacy. “Empty House” is a movie about the beautiful fullness of being, removed from the earth anchor. A wonderful story in its unreality that there are no limits to love and thought, because we exist in the world that we created ourselves.
Tae Sook leads a very unusual lifestyle. He's breaking into other people's homes. What is unusual about this, you ask, is the usual behavior of a thief and you are right, but the catch is that of all the houses where Tae visited, nothing was lost. He enters the apartments when their owners went on vacation or on a business trip not for profit. He lives in them. He is very unsociable and untalking, living in other people's apartments is his way of interacting with people. He fixes broken appliances, washes clothes, makes minor repairs. Tae like a ghost disappears before the appearance of the owners and nothing can give away the fact that he was there at all, except that in a magical way repaired scales or a picture that by itself hung on the wall flatly, and not on the head as before. So he wandered unnoticed, changing his place of residence every couple of weeks and each time studying someone else’s life through photos and interiors in an attempt to supplement his.
But one day, one of the houses is not as empty as it seemed, and it changes everything. Sun Hwa, a beautiful woman living in a luxury house with a successful husband. However, despite all the material benefits, her life remains empty and dull. After another quarrel with her husband, she remains at home alone and a strange silent stranger enters her life.
It’s definitely one of the most extraordinary films I’ve done in my life. Almost the whole story unfolds in complete silence. The words spoken by the actors can be counted on the fingers. This film proves that the voice of true art can be heard in silence. To convey loneliness, there is no need for long tragic monologues, only a talented actor in an empty room, a successful staging of the frame and soulful music is enough. To add humor, it is unnecessary to write a funny joke, it is enough to move a golf ball by a couple of centimeters. To convey true love, it is not necessary to shoot a passionate pastel scene, quite enough gentle touch of hands in silence.
I want to applaud Lee Seung-yeon, Lee Hong-yeon and other actors standing up who have been able to say things in silence that others won’t have a thousand words to say.
P.S. To shoot such a deep personal, touching and truly authorial film could only be a man of great talent and deep soul. I take my hat off - bravo Kim Ki-duk.
Tormented loneliness gives birth to a savior. At first, he wanders aimlessly around houses that lack something, despite the fact that these houses seem to have children, coziness, and beauty in photography. To allow yourself to prank ( toy gun)? It is still a heavy soul, languishing ( the arrow of the scales at the limit). To fill the house with music (Natacha Atlas - Gafsa?) In order to gain freedom, you just have to escape. From a house where there is no love. But what decides escape if the mind is still in prison and the soul is languishing? Like a golf ball, driven by a club in a circle, a person is driven in a circle until he sees the result of a purposeless waste of time - death halfway to perhaps the same empty house ( watch tick). If you are willing to protest, the best way to break the cycle is to say no and stand in the way of the ball, otherwise the irreparable will happen.
Tae-sook is attentive to small things, caring and wise beyond his years, as a person who has been alone with his thoughts for a long time can be. But has anyone tried to free his consciousness and be alone with himself, not allowing himself a single thought ("policeman"), even for 5 minutes? Understanding the world is incomplete – as long as you see only 180 degrees ahead of you, you will cast a shadow and “take into account the human mind like an idiot.” When you let go of your mind and attain perfection, you feel that behind you is a Person who understands you, your individuality and your peculiarity as himself, a Person who is ready to protect you from being slapped in the face by slapping back at your offender, a Person who knows the true freedom not only of man, but also of his mind.
Sun-hwa took responsibility for her fate, now she takes a direct part in everything, even cleaning clothes with her hands. Man is naturally happy, and harmony with himself makes him weightless and invulnerable. One of the commandments of God, echoing Eastern wisdom, says: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” So did the main character, starting with himself. Sun-hwa turned on the imagination and Tae-suk came to her - her true self, filled with meaning and inner peace.
Very sensual, very organic, like Ying-Yang, and subtle, like the whole East, filled with symbols film.
Confident ten.
This is finally the right time for my first attempt to share my impressions of watching a wonderful cinematic work. Most of all, in this situation, I am pleased to know that this review will be devoted not to the macro and micro aspects of directing, cinematography or the work of the writer, which is still worth noting, from the very first moments of the film set a very high bar, and it will be devoted to my subjective perception of the secondary and very veiled directorial message.
Personally, it seemed to me that the main character of the picture Kim Ki-dok is a symbolic physical embodiment of the concept of time – after all, the behavior of the hero is often colored in very recognizable gradations and parallels. For example, the main theme of forgiveness steadily develops from hatred and forgetting the main character to the final emotional catharsis, which becomes possible only thanks to the time spent and accumulated experience throughout the film. Invisible harmony between the heroine and the main silent hero, in the end, as if hovering in the air and I think that almost everyone can confirm the madness of love, but the joy of inner harmony. Secondary (if you can call them that) storylines and characters once again prove that time can always make its own adjustments – whether it is moved furniture items or disappeared interior items. Attempts to punish or control time are shown to be doomed to failure and are catalysts that can accelerate and increase the pace of an already elusive time.
While I’m not a big fan of identifying directorial styles and geography, I would advise everyone to take a deep breath and try to materialize and experience time with all parts of their body, almost as every second of Kim Ki-dok’s film feels.
How little does it take to express the main thing?
Korean director Kim Ki-duk's "Empty House" meditation showed me the world from the other side. It made me think about how few words are needed to express true feelings. Sometimes they're not needed at all. People have forgotten how to live by sensations. We always prove things to each other. Or maybe you? As a rule, the more words, the less meaning.
It's nice to stop sometimes. To be quiet. Look inside yourself.
How often do we engage in self-deception? We say one thing, we do another, and we act as we see fit. A person can consider himself happy when thoughts, deeds and words coincide.
For me, Kim KI Dook's films are always a revelation. Movies that flip perceptions, fill and inspire.
The entire long and thorny path of the development of world cinema from the XIX century to the present day: the efforts of all Lumières, Chaplins, Edisons, Fellini, the change of eras of silent and sound cinema, the transition from black and white film to color, French revolutions, Danish dogmas are fully justified by the last 10 minutes of the film of the Korean director.
You know, Venderosovskaya ' The sky over Berlin' gently envelops and makes you smile softly and happily a few days after watching; a modern fairy tale-parable by Patrice Leconta ' Girl on the Bridge' helps you believe in a miracle, luck in the middle of somewhere infinitely rushing cities, where the main values are only sex and the thirst for money; Kar Wai, with the help of some amazingly subtle Chinese wisdom, elevates you to the realm of high feelings, free from the matter of everyday life. Tarkovsky stone calm of his reasoning on the theme of the fundamental questions of the universe pushes the viewer on the way to search for their own answers.
What did Kim Ki-duk deserve to be among the great Koreans? What did he manage to put into his 'Empty House' such that it does not allow him to be classified as simply talented filmmakers?
To my taste, Kim Ki-duk, with the inherent confidence of Buddhist monks, poked his finger into the sky and hit the target. This goal is that corner of the human being who at any age continues to believe in miracles, which is characterized by unconditional love. A corner where the conventions of the surrounding world have not reached.