"Bad Guy (Nabbeun namja)" is an earlier film of Ki-duk Kim that is probably being released now in the U.S. due to the success of "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom)," but fans of that visually entrancing parable should be warned how very different this exploration of the depths of human nature is.
The style has some similarity in that there is no exposition and we have to connect images that tell a tale of two very different people over time. Context is everything as voyeurism keeps repeating along a sexual spectrum of men and women together -- to romantic or erotic or degrading or lustful or violent, full of obsession or love or hate or longing or disgust, whether in prostitution, a relationship, or rape.
A key context is emotions and degrees, whether by the man or woman, or mutual, or drained of feeling such that I'm not sure love has any meaning in this film. There's a recurring use of Egon Schiele's erotic art to make some kind of comparative point about a continuum of sexual images and their effect on the viewer.
The titular character is reminiscent of Quasimodo of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" fixating on Esmeralda if he were a psychopathic pimp in, I presume, Seoul's lurid red light district and played by the charismatic Jae-hyeon Jo, like an apolitical "Romper Stomper." I did get a little lost where he fit into the hierarchy of the yakuza-like gangster organization that controls the district, how much authority he has, and who was on top of whom to interpret their obsessions. Some of the encounters we see are presumably his limited fantasies as he miraculously recovers from various violently noble efforts to protect and reach out to the object of his affection that reminded me of the ambiguous ending of Jane Campion's "The Piano."
The film explores some of the same territory as the work of Catherine Breillat, but the context seems uneasily different when I'm the only woman in the theater and the director is male, perhaps because the central woman is always an object, even as she pitifully adapts to her various degradations, and even resists being freed from them. All the women in the film treat each other like the men treat them.
