Stateless Things

Saw the film at Febiofest's Another Shore program (a gay and lesbian film section), a latest South Korean drama reflects the society's hindrance towards the young generation.

The film has a mesmerizing spell on its stern and artsy-indie feel (almost 120 minutes screening time is a sign), narrating two individual stories of two boys' polarized but equally paradoxic situation of survival and inevitably delving in a dreamlike eventual paragraph to merge both characters into a perplexing denouement with an overdone death legerdemain.

Sometimes ostentatious, sometimes intriguing, sometimes verbose, sometimes dizzily dazzling, the film is a cocktail of illegal immigrants, menial working-condition, prostitution, gay-man-in-the-closet conundrum, all are regulated in a mixed bag, with an undercurrent of graphic gay sex part as the tardy gambit.

The cinematography work is a commendable completion, noteworthy is the chimerical part after the title (a much-delayed presence near the two thirds of the running time), grayish, grainy haziness infuses the entire screen, aggravating the dubious identity-split obscurity.

The cast is precisely chosen, discharges an austere and unvarnished rawness thanks to the tensile strength from an unknown cast, a sterling gay sex scene is graphic and provocative to defy all the moral bottom-line. The backfire is that some matter-of-the-fact shootings are redundant, e.g. the stirring SM action of a prostitute, the tourist-fawned sight-seeing visiting, and a fixation of a prolonged long-shot of the North Korean boy walking rapidly on the street, which are all overcooked.

About the hypnotic and bewildering end, director Kim Kyung-Mook cunningly leaves a multi- interpretation for the audiences, it's a non sequitur cul-de-sac, the real world could be much crueler than one could anticipate, we all need some post-mortem rumination about the younger generations' status quo.