dongseong-hwang
Ik-Joon Yang is the director, writer, and main actor in this movie. He produced this movie using his private money.The home of Yeon-Hue, the main actress, is Ik-Joon's renting house. After recording all scene in the house, he moved out from his home because his money run out and he needed his deposit in the house.He spent his every money to this movie, and fortunately this movie hits the 5rd best in the Korea indie movie history. Many Japanese also watched this movie in the theater.I really appreciate his marble art; Breathless and King of the pigsFor more information, please refer to this wiki. https://mirror.enha.kr/wiki/%EB%98%A5%ED%8C%8C%EB%A6%AC This is written in Korean but Google translator might help you.
Leofwine_draca
BREATHLESS, a 2008 film from South Korean detailing the misadventures of a small-time debt collector and the relationships he strives to pursue, is a hard-hitting slice of social drama that takes casual violence to whole new level. It's clearly a heartfelt project from Ik-Joon Yang, who wrote and directed as well as taking the starring role. Yang is excellent in all three capacities.With a constantly profane script, a gritty level of realism throughout, and an entire lack of sentimentality, BREATHLESS is a thoroughly engaging piece of realist cinema. It has a cinema verite look about it, taking place on mean and run-down streets, and if some viewers find it depressing then that's because it strives to reflect real life rather than movie fantasy.Violence - in the form of beatings and slappings - comes thick and fast and there's so much of it that the viewer soon becomes as desensitised as the central characters, so that the latest punishment almost becomes expected. Yet the quality characterisations and the intermingling of lots of different characters' lives is handled expertly so that this is never less than riveting. It's a strong film indeed, one that's tough to watch at times, but once which explores the depths of the human condition that most movies dare not tread.
grinchbkb
(MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS) Arguably, extreme violence – or ultra-violence as Burguess would put it - has been one the most prominent traits of Korean cinema in the last decade, to the point that for many mainstream cinema-goers, it came to define it. The worldwide success and broad critical acclaim of Park Chan-wook revenge flicks, filled with gore and stylised perversity overshadowed the diversity of one of the most productive and inventive national film industries to create a stereotypical sub-genre: the extreme Korean thriller. Thematically, Breathless does not seem to disappoint the viewer's expectation: from the opening frame to the last scene, the film is relentlessly violent – but its depiction and meaning could not be more remote to Park Chan-wook's universe. Yang-Ik Jook, the director who also displays an impressive intensity in the leading role of his first feature, opts for a naturalistic approach to filming – all close-ups, simple shots and hand-held camera – light years from the complicated, westernised, post-Fight Club aesthetic of Park's vengeance trilogy. The epitome of Park Chan-Wook's visual style when dealing with violence can be found in Old Boy, with the infamous brawl in the jail corridor, where the lone hero overcomes one by one all his attackers in a virtuoso tracking-shot directly inspired by the beat-'em-up video games. Violence here is unreal: "just fun" - like in a Tarantino movie. In contrast, Sang- hoon, the main protagonist of Breathless, a debt collector spending his days beating to a pulp every single human being in sight, doesn't even know what a Playstation is (which he actually calls a "Play-shit"), until he agrees to buy one to his nephew, in a rare display of kindness. In a film saturated with symbols and totemic items (western child toys, knifes, phones, hammers), the introduction of the Playstation can be read as a departure from this insensitive, immature and virtual approach to the issue that is violence; and more specifically in Breatless' case, domestic violence. A moral tale about domestic violence and its consequences, the film reproduces the cyclical nature of child abuse. The bullied child becomes the bully; the victimised mother produces a traumatised daughter, a beating follows another beating and so on. This makes the film structurally repetitive and quite predictable, but remarkably, it also gives a forceful depth to the directors' hard-hitting argument about the responsibility that victims have in perpetuating the cycle originated by their tormentors. After an uncompromising first hour letting the viewer astonished and weary of Yang-Ik Jook shock and awe approach, the director suddenly introduces a sentimental edge to Breathless with an unexpected touching montage of the two main characters (the thug and the high school girl) taking the gangster's nephew to the fair, where he can, at last, be a child again. This passage, with its cheesy oriental music, is very reminiscent of Takeshi's Kitano similarly tender moments in his romantic gangster chronicles. This is also the only time, along with another pivotal twist taking place later on in the film (the father's suicide attempt), that Yang-Ik Jook uses mood music – the rest of the soundtrack containing only diegetic sounds of incessant kicking, punching, slapping and screaming noises, which provide, like a percussion set, the internal rhythm of the film.Littered with more swear words than a vintage Scorsese epic, Breathless, whose original title Ddjongpari could be translated "fly-shit", is also a study of the social alienation that comes with the lack of education that often originates in the trauma of child abuse: its main characters don't have the words to express their frustrations but only their fists and can only mimic what they have witnessed. Even marks of affections are sent through play-fighting (Sang-Hoon and his nephew) or verbal abuse (Sang-Hoon and the adolescent girl he calls "crazy bitch"). School education is regarded as important by all characters (the wannabe gangsters are always asked if they graduated from high-school by the mob boss) but remains a vacuous, distant, superficial dream, alien to their world of poverty and violence. The ending works superbly in a series of symmetrical narrative motifs, leaving room for hope as seen in the concluding flash-forward. The transformation of Sang-hoon is brutally quick, but remains believable. A martyr of child abuse, his will to change his ways and break the cycle will eventually kill him but save his family. It is a powerful conclusion to an overly brutal film that leave bruises like a punch in the face, but also handles its gentle moments with a disarming sincerity.More film reviews at ggendron.wordpress.com
