Breathless

Sang-hoon collects debts for a moneylender. The job is beating and frightening, and he does it without thinking. He argues with a high school student in the street and the girl answers back. Yeon-hue is not afraid, and a strange friendship forms between them. Their houses are the same: fathers who use violence, no mothers, siblings who cannot get out. Sang-hoon's father is out of prison and back at home. The man hates his father and does the same thing, and he knows it. The violence passes from one generation to the next and nobody can stop it. Yang Ik-june writes, directs and plays the lead. Kim Kkob-bi plays Yeon-hue. It is a Korean production. It was made independently on a very low budget; the director used his own means to finance it. It won the Tiger award at the Rotterdam Film Festival and took prizes at many festivals. The matter it treats is that violence is learned; the film saves no character. The relationship between the two is not romantic and the narrative does not pull it that way once. The use of obscenity in the Korean is dense and works as a choice of style. Its limit is the watching; the violent scenes are frequent and the narrative gives the viewer no relief. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean independent cinema and hard realist drama. Who it is not for: the violence is very explicit, the language coarse, and the ending destroying.