Four of Them

-A silent young man (Cho Jae-hyun), insulted by a woman he forcibly kisses in the park (Seo Won), traps her into prostitution, only to become prtective of her. Kim Ki-duk, who can be called the artsiest of all the South Korean art directors.

-Which is, of course, how you must approach this film. As an artwork rather than an actual movie. A blunt look at gangsters and prostitution (I can't speak for the rest of the world, but is it somewhat regular for whorehouses to be lined up like storefronts, with girls just chilling behind glass windows?), with no villain and no hero, as every character is painfully human. From the silent man, a pimp enforcer named Han-gi, whose borderline affection for his cronies goes to the point that, when one of them stabs him, he, bleeding on the beach, tries to bury the knife in the sand. Even the most obviously sympathetic one, the girl Sun-hwa, is undone by her own tendency to steal (not that that's an excuse).

-Some aspects of this were out of nowhere and confusing (the damn bloody picture), and by just reading the synopsis it hardly sounds like a decent movie, but once you get into it, it's actually quite fascinating, if not outright enthralling.

-Or, y'know, whatever.