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"Fucking bitch – you wanna die?" says a thug in the street as he slaps a woman repeatedly about the face. Soon a second man, Sang-hoon (Yang Ik-june), intervenes, although he is no knight in shining armour – for after beating the thug senseless, Sang-hoon turns to the woman and starts hitting her too. "Why do you just take it? Stupid bitch!"
This opening sequence is a perfect introduction to both the tone and themes of Ddongpari (or Breathless). Shot in frenetic handheld that matches the tinderbox rawness of its protagonist, this is a film that reveals the contagion of abuse and cyclicality of violence in a manner so unflinching that viewers will spend half its duration wondering how on earth they are to empathise with the coarse brutality of Sang-hoon – and the other half being deeply moved, even reduced to tears, by his tragic struggle against himself. Cinema rarely comes more hard-hitting (in every sense) than this – and yet there is a real tenderness around its rough edges, as well as a disarming compassion for the sort of characters so easily dismissed as mere monsters.
Sang-hoon is both a product and a perpetuator of mindless savagery. He works as a strong-arm man for a debt collection agency run by his only friend Man-sik (Jeong Man-shik), and is in it less for the cash-in-hand rewards than for the violence itself. He even takes his work home with him, treating his young nephew Hyung-in with gruff aggression, and regularly beating up his own father, unable to forgive him for the deaths, years ago, of his mother and sister.
When Sang-hoon runs into school student Yeon-hee (Kim Kot-bi) in the street, his actions are typical. First he spits and swears at the girl, and when she stands up to him, he unhesitantly punches her into unconsciousness. Still, Yeon-hee is as fearless as Sang-hoon himself, recognising in him aspects of her own troubled domestic life – and soon they form an unlikely friendship together, snatching moments of serene stillness in each other's company, and imagining for the first time the possibility of change. Yet as Sang-hoon teaches his thuggish trade to a young man without realising that this would-be gangster is in fact Yeon-hee's brother (Lee Hwan), the legacy of abuse is handed on...
As anyone familiar with Park Chan-wook's Oldboy or Na Hong-jin's The Chaser will recognise, Breathless is hardly the first South Korean film to show a hard man tempered by his contact with a younger woman, but its approach to the violence that it depicts is so thoroughly responsible, so determinedly deglamorised, unspectacular and non-celebratory, that it might as well have come from a different cinematic universe.
Here, violence is so pervasive, in the characters' language, postures and actions, that it becomes the very lifeblood of the film – but it is the quieter moments, expertly modulated by a very subtle score, that have the greatest impact. It is a haunting (and now multi-award-winning) debut from Yang, who proves equally talented as writer, director and actor.
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