Film: I’m A Cyborg
Release date: 26th May 2008
Certificate: 15
Running time: 105 mins
Director: Park Chan-wook
Starring: Lim Su-jeong, Rain, Choi Hie-jin, Kim Byeong-ok, Lee Yong-nyeo
Genre: Comedy/Drama/Romance
Studio: Tartan
Format: DVD
Country: South Korea
I’m A Cyborg is a film by Park Chan-wook that takes a more light-hearted approach to his usual style of twisted storytelling. Fans of his successful vengeance trilogy will be surprised at the U-turn but won’t necessarily be disappointed by the cute escapades of two teenage mental patients.
While working in a radio production factory, Cha Young-goon (Lim Su-jeong) hears a voice instruct her to harm herself, and inevitably she is shocked trying to plug herself into the mains. To show that she is fully recharged, the toes of her right foot light up in different colours, mimicking the bar gauges on mobile phones.
All the while Young-goon’s Mother is narrating. He is telling the doctor about how her daughter acts – that she speaks like an old person because her granny brought her up, who herself has already been sectioned because she thinks she is a mouse and only eats radishes.
After the incident at the factory, Young-goon is immediately hospitalised, and as she is lying motionless in her bed, another patient is telling her about the others on the ward. She wheels Young-goon’s bed around the hospital and shows her ‘the hiccup clock’, where, supposedly, a patient who couldn’t stop hiccupping hid in the clock and withered away. They continue to the recreation room where the male lead, Il-sun (Rain) is playing table tennis in a colourful rabbit mask. Young-goon’s escort tells her a tall tale about Il-sun; that he was so ashamed in prison about what he had done that he burned his handsome face with cigarettes and sewed up his own anus (to which the audience is shown a humorous clip of Il-sun picking a wedgie before serving the next ball).
Young-goon refuses to speak to her peers or nursing staff, instead befriending the vending machine to which she speaks to late at night. Meanwhile, Il-sun is being accused of stealing all sorts of preposterous things from his colleagues, from hunger to table tennis skills. He performs makeshift rituals where he covers the victim’s face in paint then wraps a piece of paper around them. He holds his palm open upon their shoulder and says “transfer,” and then the victim slaps his palm to transfer the desired stolen trait.
This is when the film starts to pick up. Young-goon has been following and watching Il-sun’s shenanigans, and approaches him to ask if he could “steal her sympathy” so that she may fulfil her cyborg duties without her human emotions. Il-sun refuses at first, stealing her Granny’s dentures instead, but when he does finally take the “sympathy,” cyborg Young-goon blossoms, wreaking havoc and carnage around the hospital…
Lim Su-jeong is very likable as the loopy Young-goon. She has a youthful face and portrays a very endearing, child-like character.
Rain proves to be a man of many faces. He is able to take Il-sun from the aloof, seemingly ‘normal’ Ping-Pong enthusiast through all the stolen traits of the other characters with ease and charm, making the film hilarious, and allowing us to forgive the apparent lack of substantial plot.
Another notable character is a man who is “so humble he can only walk backwards,” and is a master of redundant statements, at one point, as he is trying to console a fellow patient’s recent defeat at table tennis, he delivers a very daft consoling line about how “Ping-Pong is about giving and receiving,” and “why must we only give after we’ve received?” The other patient is clearly not impressed.
Dynamics like that between the characters are very entertaining, and obviously the essence of the film is how the patients interact with each other, rather than a straight storyline, which often leaves characters static and lacklustre, while the director trundles through an over-elaborate narrative.
There are scenes that may have been better off not being included, like ones that involve special effects that turn the narrative overly surreal, and into detached dream sequences. Although, when Young-goon believes she is transforming parts of her body into automatic weapons, there is a delightful massacre scene halfway through the film that will indulge long-time Park fans, and still keep the spunky, innocent feel of the rest of the film.
The cinematography is, as ever with Park, spectacular, with the scenes being supported by intense pastel colours, giving the impression of the character’s performing straight out of a children’s book, with lots of repetition of solid, geometric shapes. The eating hall, in particular, is very aesthetic, and also the solitary confinement room, which is a padded cell in a brilliant bright green.
For all the bright and sugary props that keep the audience entertained, an overall storyline is tricky to find – it’s clearly a romance story between two disturbed individuals that will always have problems by themselves in society, but there is no solid, expectant conclusion to tie all the ends together.
As long as you’re not expecting the gratuitous violence of the vengeance trilogy and allow I’m A Cyborg to breathe on its own, it’ll be easier to appreciate as a modern, dark fairytale. The imagery is slick and the characters are attractive and likeable, but the overall storyline seems to teeter out by the credits. You won’t get a satisfying conclusion, but you will laugh hard and easily. AW
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