The Art of Fighting

Byung-tae is the boy who gets beaten at school over and over; he has learned to run, to shrink and to tell nobody. One day he meets Pan-su, a middle-aged man in the neighbourhood who actually knows how to fight, and starts taking lessons. What he learns is not about throwing punches: when to stop, how to use fear, how most fights are lost before they begin. The stronger Byung-tae gets, the more the real test becomes deciding who to hit. It belongs to the run of Korean films that handle school bullying through comedy and fight-movie shapes, but the ending offers no comfort. The film stops at the point where violence starts being presented as a solution and looks instead at where the student takes what he has learned. Baek Yoon-sik's Pan-su is not a wise master but someone who has never settled with his own past. The pacing is quick, though the pauses use the silence of school corridors.