Matinees! The theatre has been boarded up for too many months. But we are back. And with a love story.
I'm a Cyborg But That's O.K. (2006) is one of the more recent films your projectionist has shown. So worth it. Every time i watch, i tear up with the gentleness of the love, the ache of loss and the questions of sanity and madness---reality versus imagination. How a majority agreed upon reality is enforced upon others. And how individuals choose to challenge those assumptions, by being born into or shaped by disparate conceptions of life. Love in this film is boundless to those social assumptions---instead, it is creative and brave.
Our film takes place in a mental asylum in South Korea and our cyborg hero is the stunning Cha Young-goon, played by Su-jeong Lim. Dealing with the institutionalization of her grandmother, Young-goon sees herself as a combat cyborg. She is committed by her mother to a sanitorium after she electrocutes herself at work. Young-goon has stopped eating food and believes she is recharged only through electricity.
In the mental institution, Young-goon is under the care of the kind head doctor and occupies the women's ward with a fellow patient who thinks she can fly and eats Young-goon's food, and another who believes herself to be an alpine maiden.
Young-goon also meets the equally gorgeous Park Il-soon played by Rain. He is the bad boy of the institution, first one blamed for pranks and always last to serve ass on the ping pong table.
They are instantly fascinated by each other and Young-goon enlists Il-soon to take away her human empathy so that she can kill everyone, out of vengeance for her grandmother.
Il-soon nods to her request and the two are partners in upsetting the asylum's banalities. Young-soon is given shock therapy by doctors who hope the surges will make her eat again. Instead she feels electrically recharged and thinks she is an invincible killing machine. Externally, her health is getting worse...
Something beautiful happens because Il-soon is slowly falling in love with the little cyborg and he devises a way to get her to eat again.
The climax is too gorgeous to spoil for you Matinees, but i will give you these clues: a rainstorm, a cork, an antenna and a tent.
Cinematographically, this film plays with the different realities of all the patients by honoring what they see and what the conventional view is at the same time. Lovely. Director Park Chan-wook offers a visually trippy albeit tender love story---it is both pieces that you need, because isn't that sort of a philosophy of love? A beautiful, surreal, scary trip to find someone whose weird dances with your own weird?
IMDB
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