The picture amazes at the very beginning, when the director did not even fully play the debut. God, did this one of the brightest, most talented and original masters of world cinema of the early 21st century? These primitive frontal mise-en-scene, unsophisticated editing moves, declarative, devoid of the breath of life dialogues and to become them acting work - straightforward, without subtext, in the forehead - that's all Kim Ki-duk? Is this the result of a painful transplantation of the Korean mentality on Kazakh soil? Is it possible that the cardboardness of speech and the falsity of intonations are a consequence of the fact that the Korean director’s ear did not hear this substitution in Russian speech (and most of the film is shot in Russian). Whether Kim Ki-duk counted on such a spectator protest and distrust in the beginning, whether it was part of his plan - I cannot say. But the fact that by the middle of the picture you forget about all the uncomfortable questions - for sure. At the same time, nothing changes in the style of the picture. Mizan scenes are also trivial, the speeches of the heroes are just as direct and simple, rare editing games are perceived as clues for fools and already interfere: it would be better if everything remained as in the beginning - simply, straightforward, rude. Depth can be achieved not in the plot, not in psychology, not in acting and not in vignettes of editing temporite. God, as always, is in detail.
So, Dean lives in modern Almaty, but in a family with strong patriarchal traditions. Each step is controlled by the parents and the older brother. Mild tyranny at the level of a subscription not to leave: they are released to meet with their girlfriends, but the list of friends is approved by the elders, the hour of returning home is strictly observed. A chance meeting with a peer will change everything in the life of a submissive girl. She dresses provocatively, independently, strong-willed, sharp, meets with whom she wants and when she wants. And not just girlfriends. For heart and soul, one young man, for money and independence, another. The girl's name is also Dean. And it looks like two drops of water, like Dean 1. In short, Dr. Jekyll has met with Mr. Hyde.
The princess will bravely travel to her alter ego family to rid her of domestic tyranny. And on a dangerous tightrope journey between a lover and a lover, he sends a new girlfriend. She, however, gets only a relationship with her lover Dean-2, to her beloved feminist modest will not dare to send. But the lover is not only rich. He's still young and handsome. A series of substitutions is the plot of the film.
Qui pro quo story as one hero is mistaken for another - one of the most common techniques in literature and cinema. In the cinema, most often there is a comedy option. The discrepancy between the expectations of others and the real behavior of the hero gives a lot of opportunities for creating funny collisions. The arrival of Din-2 under the guise of Din-1 in a family with “reliable moral foundations” at first seems to be a continuation of this tradition. In any case, the Kazakh version of some Zita and Gita. Beautiful and brave under the guise of defenseless and submissive comes to the family of despots and puts everyone in their place. But Kim Ki-duk does not draw any comic effect from this collision, although the reaction of relatives is not an incredible transformation of the sister-daughter and amusing. But all the comic plaque washes away life. The appearance of a girl, accustomed to luxury rooms of luxury hotels, on the squalid kitchen of a modest house on the outskirts of Almaty kills the laughter element at the root. Cynicism, self-will, consumer attitude to people and feelings are tightly linked with Gucci, Pucci, Versace, bundles of money, fine wines and delicacies. At the same time, the homespun was stuck dead in a primitive life with a pussy plastic picture in the kitchen, painted uneven floors, a chiffonier of the Soviet era and a simple dinner. And also a family photo, where four people under an umbrella look with decisive severity into the eyes of a hostile world. “The Prince and the Beggar” is not the most fun book. Nothing has changed since then, Kim Ki-duk said. He neither condemns nor supports. He simply states the obvious fact that where there is money and wealth, there is freedom from everything, including morality. Where there is modesty and tradition, there is moral violence and rigid restrictions. This is the picture of this, no longer Marktven world.
For Kim Ki-duk, Kazakhstan has become an ideal battleground for the traditional way of life and the new rules of the game. In South Korea, modernism won, if not a final victory, then an intermediate victory. To meet the old and the new Dean there would have to pick the background of a small town or village. Here, Domostroy struggles with aggressive feminism in the largest city of the republic, Almaty. It beats to blood. Literally. And it is cruelty that turns out to be the cement that ensures the connection of times. On slaps, cuts, blows do not skimp neither supporters of traditions nor adherents of new mores. According to the number of slaps handed out to the right and left by the characters of the picture, “Dissolving” can claim leadership in world cinema. In the Dean family, the right of first strike belongs to the brother and parents according to the laws of primogeniture. The "new Kazakh" on the right of financial solvency. Here, every punch has a price. You want to hit? Shoot! It's expensive. They beat the law of ancestors. They're beating for money now. In the battle of old and new, cruelty wins.
The director at home became the hero of the scandal. The unnamed actress accused the director of cruelty on the set and sexual harassment. Kim Ki-duk slapped himself on set, explaining that it was part of the rehearsal. All other charges denied, demanding through the court compensation for moral compensation. The court dismissed the claim. No one could prove anything.
"Dissolving" is in part Kim Ki-duk's response to the court's decision. The form accepted today as an axiom: sex for a man is the satisfaction of base lust, for a woman - a victim, is turned by the director to the reverse side. He tries to explore the nature of maiden sexual curiosity from the female side. He insists: Yes, for a girl, this experience can be cruel and traumatic, but the basis is not always male lust. Female curiosity is a powerful engine that cannot be ignored either.
White will never dissolve into black. Neither the new nor the old will ever win the final victory. A submissive daughter will not extinguish her interest in other men, nor will an avant-garde feminist, plunging into the mores of a patriarchal family, sometimes grieve about the overprotection that surrounds her less emancipated sister. Each has his own. Blue, of course, can dissolve in yellow, giving birth to a new paint - green. But most often, the paints mixed result in the color of dirt. In the dry residue - a torn family photo and numerous slaps, the marks on the face from which pass, and from memory are not erased.
What is good and what is bad At this point, I still consider Kim Ki-duk the best director of mankind. Because I still don’t find the words to describe his films of the zero years. Which are imbued with such extraordinary poetry that it will be above any verbal constructions invented in my head. In the 10s, Kim went into the topic of violence, and his recent works are so different from the handwriting of a Korean that you can write something about them. Dissolve is associated with previously seen simple Kazakh films, not burdened with a large budget. There are morals in these films, questions about right and wrong. And so Morality at full height appeared in the filmography of Kim Ki-duk. And you can’t beat it here, because behind the main plot you can’t find any aesthetic things, romance, or any symbols. Secondary characters are schematic to the limit, and it remains only to look at the main character. It's very simple - this is the wrong thing to do, and she, the girl, knows it. From the handwriting of the master, there was only a kind of "spiral" - the repetition of the situation again and again, each time with a new degree of tension. Until quantity turns into quality. Until knowledge becomes understanding. Until the knowledge of sin turns into the irretrievable bitterness of the taste of sin. 7 out of 10 Original
The desire for another life, another self, is a perpetual motion machine, a terrible force that pushes you to take risks, makes you run, drives you crazy, dissolves, bifurcates, changes consciousness, splits it.
The gray mouse living in a poor pseudo-patriarchal family, where words cannot be said, the girl must be a shadow and wait for her to be handed over as a commodity to a profitable party. A family where the features of a human being are preserved only by the father - tired of all the elderly person. In a family where the chief overseer is a brother, dissatisfied, unfulfilled, tyrant. All his complexes taking out in surveillance of his sister. Home at six in the evening, not a minute later. Dress like an old maid. Please don’t let anyone look at you!
Vulgar tear with defiant makeup, deep neckline and skirt just below the underpants. Bold, unbridled, giving her charms for a good reward. Elite, the best. You want to hit? - Hit! It's expensive. A broken lip will first decorate, then heal. Bold, desperate, living in an endless dangerous game.
Plus and minus. The opposite? Two facets of one, the obverse and the reverse? A portrait of a person in which everything is external (family, society, objective conditions of unsightly life, archaic conventions) and internal (hopes, dreams, secret passions). Duality? No - unity.
Cheap, “penny” visual film “Dissolve” with a negative assessment on the PC remained misunderstood, unappreciated. A girl is raped in the ruins in the forest off the coast - she finished it herself. No pity. Man, human in man dissolves in the indifference of everything and everything around. No pity. And the question remains open – the cruelty of loved ones, which at some point in the film suddenly reveals love – is love really or another deception, in which the heroine wants to believe?
We're being raped. We're not allowed to be us. The world is riddled with pain - it cries. We live in conditions that are imposed. Man is nothing. Money, everything. More money, more money!
The film is directed by Kim Ki-duk. Korean Balabanov. Or Balabanov, the Russian Kim Ki-duk. They made similar movies. And both went to one thing in their movies - less words, less money, less "cinema"; more themselves, more life. Ki-Duk, of course, excelled in this respect: Ariran is unique in its courage and candor, even if it is impossible to watch. Comparisons will reveal a lot in common - no, kinship.
Brutal and hard, gentle and piercing. His characters cry out for pain in silence, mutilate themselves and others – to express or relieve emotional pain through the physical; love beyond human understanding and possibilities. Infinitely beautiful symbolic scenes - and pictures of sophisticated virtuoso cruelty. Always at the limit or beyond.
Philosophical, parable, religious, social, political, films-confessions, films-prayers, films-provocations - a separate independent world in the world of cinema. It's a really cool movie.
Director, screenwriter, cameraman, production designer, editor, producer. A great and terrible Korean.
Kim Ki-duk is gone. It's like a whole movie.
There are many talented, capable, outstanding directors. There are a lot of big, big, expensive movies. And there are special authors. And the box office, the number of fans of their films, the assessment of criticism - all this has the second, third, fourth value.
We’ve all been waiting – we’re not going to wait – for his new announced projects. It didn’t matter how they were removed. We knew that there was a world of cinema in which tears dripping silently for the imperfection of human life. A world where everyone loves us. A world in which all our passions matter — and more than money, power, politics. A world in which a man, a little man, is higher and greater than the state, for there is peace in it.
Kim Ki-duk left in 2020. I don't know how or where. Some hospital in some former republic of the former Soviet Union. Almost like a bum. In principle, such care seems almost the best. Geniuses should not go away like generalissimos, like folk favorites. The fate of the great is not to illuminate.
But what do we do? Not liking politics, leaders, the environment? What do we do, losing the last artists, creators, geniuses? Losing movies?
Dissolved is the last film of the terrible and great Korean. "Dissolve" is his last word. And this is his word. We won't hear any more. Everyone is against violence against man. Kim Ki-duk is crying for us. In all his films. We weep for him, for we are orphans. We can dissolve into ourselves, it will never dissolve into us.
The longer I live in the world, the more I respect traditions. Everything. This, you know, saves from the complete immersion of the individual in some subordinate and completely amorphous world man-herd.
I have known Kim Ki-dok for a long time. It all started with probably the most viewers of his film “Spring, summer, autumn...” Kim Ki-dok is a great artist with an amazing attitude. In his films, flowers and dirt are inexplicably mixed, blood and tears, animal malice and naive childish kindness. I saw almost all of his paintings. I have never been disappointed.
The director respects people, finding in almost every character the subtlest threads of light of the human Soul that are not noticeable to others. Kim Ki-dok himself looks exactly at the lightness of the sun’s rays, timidly seeping through the dense clouds of cruelty and inequality that rule the ball in the modern world; and he makes us, his spectators, look with him. You read and watch his films, like an art album.
Yesterday I finally watched Kim Ki-dok's first film Crocodile (1996). It was a good debut. The usual story of a small bandit who has not seen anything in his life, except muzzle, bloodshed, fraud, obsessed with the desire to have every, accidentally turned up a “boy”, saves a drowning girl. And from this banalism, Kim Ki-dok creates with the help of his group a real parable about the feelings of people in whom you begin to believe and whom you clearly empathize.
A few words about the director’s latest work. The film “Dissolve” (2019) was shot in Kazakhstan. Undoubtedly, not a film in the modern philistine sense, but a movie parable, a genre so characteristic of the work of Kim Ki-dok. It draws attention to the fact that in his most recent (as, alas, it turned out) picture, the Artist carefully examines the Female Beginning, although in his first film works the Masculine has always prevailed. I must say that Kim Ki-dok’s male characters have never been so pathetic as in the movie Dissolve. This is on the one hand – the “literate consumer”, the “master of the position”, buying everything and everyone for talk about art, on the other – a gray mass of faceless guys.
The story is as simple as ever, and its meaning is here: “Not always a fruit that seems sweet to you from afar will really please your taste. It is often quite the opposite.
King Solomon said, “Three things my mind cannot comprehend: the way of the bird in the sky, the way of the serpent on earth, and the way of a man to the heart of a woman.” The great Korean director Kim neither Doc has sought this path in all his films. Found it.
Two worlds, two psychology, two personalities, two choices, one body. Youth born in the modern world, and in this case female, is free. Released. It conducts a spiral dialogue reflected in the mirrors of conscience and challenges sincerity both to those who do not hear, do not want to hear, but WANT much and immediately, right now, and to those who have forgotten what it is to hear clearly and purely, trying to arrange the conversation through the all-contorting echo of timelessness. Extremes, irrelevance and thrash through the prism of the modern CIS, for some reason speaking and trying to think in Russian. There's a lie in everyone's pants pocket. It is necessary to affectionately and lovingly educate both a young soul, barely born into the white world and immediately thrown with force into the gray cauldron of life, and a lean, ossified cohort of desires to follow the still flaming breath of the Dragon of the Past.
Language as a means of expressing thoughts, ideas, sounds, lifestyles, ways of death. Probably, it was possible to shoot in modern Russia, where the era of postmodernity came, but did not fully come, where the sexual revolution took place, but in some special way. But it doesn't matter. It's important that there's a person. Sometimes tearing the ground with claws in the middle of a black wasteland and distraught by painful flashes of sterile white light in an inflamed brain. Who's there? Where am I? Is it a game? Is it God? Could it be easier? Going back and going back. Philosophical pun. The eternal confrontation of the two. A citizen and a criminal. Man and woman. A child and an old man. Sex and death. But also life. What question? And for who? 'Hi, I'm Max.' Sounds as natural as sticking a jewel-painted knife in your leg as general schizophrenia and wanting to run across the train with your eyes closed. Whatever. But only for scientific experience. But whether you like it or not, the snake will enter through the eyes of one and emerge from the womb of the other. The tenderness of the maiden face and the purity of black eyes. Teach me how to live properly. No sound, no word, no rustling. Maybe then you will be able to hear something, understand something, get at least some guidance. But one head, one pair of eyes and no matter what shadows are painted on them today, sooner or later you will have to make a choice.
Mirror thin ice of mountain lakes of Kazakhstan will first show your true reflection of your face, and later, having already hardened, will indicate the still fragile road, but already certainly the path to recovery, the path to a new, but even a little less dead future.
Dedicated to Kim Ki-duk.
The film co-produced by Kazakhstan and Korea participates in the competition program of MIFF 2020. The director of the film, Kim Kiduk, was known to me primarily for presiding over the MIFF jury last year. Opening his filmography, I was surprised to find that I had not seen a single film at him yet, although his paintings consistently received prizes at Cannes and Venice Film Festivals. It was decided to correct the situation, and there is also a competitive film.
The plot revolves around the girl Dean (Dinara?), forced to live under the yoke of her traditional family, where the word of her brother or parents is the law, even if it is spoken rudely, humiliatingly and undeservedly. Dean tries to meet the requirements and not disappoint the family, but feels like in prison. One day Dean meets a girl on the street, outwardly like two drops of water like herself, but this girl is completely different in character and manners - she is extremely liberated, she makes people reckon with herself and builds her life as she wants. Having tied up with her, the girls meet, and a new acquaintance, imbued with the history of Dean’s life, decides to help her change the situation in the family, temporarily replacing her on some of the days. In return, of course, Dean will have to do something for his savior. But who is this girl and why does she look like Dean? You think you lost an illegitimate sister? Nothing like that, it's much cooler and more sudden.
The film is extremely unusual and peculiar. Not everyone will like this, and I’m sure there will be those who will ask what the writer of the script smoked. Sometimes the plot makes such culbites that you only have time to raise your eyebrows and shake your head in disbelief. That was the main plus of the film for me. Additional advantages include camera work and the quality of the “film” on which the tape is shot – the picture is simply crystal clear. Of the minuses, I will name a lot of bed scenes (yes, according to the plot, it seems necessary, but somehow there are a lot of them here) and a specific unfinished ending. Not everything is clear, I will read reviews about him later. Would I recommend watching? Yes, but only for those who like weird movies with twists and turns. Will he win the contest? Hard to say. I'm voting for Fisherman's Daughter. Will the audience remember him? Definitely.