Actors: Suh Jong, Yoosuk Kim, Sung-hee Park, Jae Hyun Cho, Hang Seon Jang
Director: Ki-Duk Kim, Producer: Eun Lee

If you are looking for a coup de theatre, watch 'The Isle'. Released in 2000, this movie is written and directed by Korean filmmaker Ki-Duk Kim. This was my first taste of Korean cinema and I must say if they are making even a handfull of these kinds of movies, I am already grabbing my jacket while running out the door for the nearest theater showing these gems.

It will not just be any movie but an experience that will appear to last 86 minutes on the screen but will last much more if you absorb every frame like I did.

A word of caution before going into the subtleties of the story and the get up of the characters in the movie: Some of the scenes are very unpleasent. Violence is mostly of an extreme kind. Also, the sexual nature of the movie and its particular slant of sado-masochism make it a little bit beyond the realm of light entertainment after a hard day`s work.
In other words, You all have been warned. (I am sure I have fanned enough interest and perhaps I can stop here, but in the interest of a more descriptive review, I will blabber on little more)

The story is about a mute woman who lives in a house on the edge of a lake. She is shown renting out these float homes to men who fit certain expected profiles, such as hiding from some danger or law, young to middle age etc. The director is more than a little heavy on metaphors. The woman`s position is established right in the beginning where all the men in these floating rooms depend upon her for everything. She is the only one with the means to get to these floating homes from land (i.e. a boat). She provides them with provisions like food, fishing supplies etc., during the day and 'delivers' them with sexual gratification at night by opening up mysteries of her body while keeping her own mute self extremely closed. Her only mode of expression from the beginning to almost the end of the movie is violence. Violence committed on men who abuse her, or due to jealousy, on a prostitute who makes the mistake of falling for a guest that the main character herself is courting. And even on herownself, when she inserts metal fishhooks in her vagina, upon realizing that the man she has fallen for maybe leaving and she has no way to call him back. (This is one of the two scenes I just could not watch with a straight face, more on this later)

The metaphor of safe havens for these men with tumultuous waters of the dangers they are running from, surrounding them, is very effective. The fact that the woman`s character is mute has to be compromised with her strength in the detail that so many depend on her for their survival and in fact are almost like her playthings that she can destroy if she feels slighted by them at any given point.

The movie is actually in Korean with English subtitles. But during the entire movie, I did not notice anyone calling her with a particular name. In fact, nobody apparently had a name. Everyone had abuse hurled at him or her at regular intervals with the mute woman getting the worst brunt probably because she seemed the most harmless.

The story takes a pivotal turn with the arrival of a man who has a bird pet and who himself is very quiet. The woman is shown to take immediate interest in him but he seems distant and lost in the memory of a past that he seems to be running from, which is shown in flashback as a murder committed in the heat of passion/jealousy.

The most prudent exposure of his character occurs on a rainy day when he rips the woman`s shirt while almost raping her when she comes to his float. The hidden anger and its stormy outbreak in the midst of a most violent cannonade of rain was the ultimate setting that Ki-Duk could think of, in my opinion.

The movie takes another turn with a prostitute entering the frame invited by the mute woman for the man who had just tried to rape her so that he can get relief after she pushed him off the float home and escaped. He is shown to take no interest in having sex with the prostitute while grabbing her fantasy by playing the age old game of seduction, namely indifference.

The scene where the man eats the metal fishhooks and is reeled in by the woman where she proceeds to pull out the hooks from his mouth and immediately mounts him while he is lying there all bloody and corpse like, is to say the least, perhaps the most cringingly nauseating scene that I have ever seen. However, the entire metaphor cannot be lost on the viewer. The catch is that it has to be viewed and not read about hence, I will not write about it anymore.

If however, you are not convinced to see this movie, after the account above, I would advise you to see it for the ending. The woman`s strong willed desire to fix every situation with impulsive reactions to them reach the most dizzying heights in the end when she pulls her lover and herself away from the consequences of her own crime.

I particularly enjoyed the quietness of the movie. There was very little dialougue and this movie has me convinced that violence described as just an impulse that siezes us is an oversimplification of the phenomenon. It can also be considered a form of expression albeit a derided one. The Isle is one of the better movies that I have seen in a while.

The movie is playing in Towne 3 in San Jose, CA, for those who live in the Bay Area. For everyone else, I would encourage you to check your local listings of mostly student and non-mainstream theater since to my knowledge this movie was never picked up by any American distributor. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.