A Film a Week - Night in Paradise / Nak won eui bam

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Tradition is just an empty word in the world of gangsters, and the same could be said also for the world of film distribution. One might expect that a genre fare with an elite festival premiere (last year’s Venice, out of competition) should end up on the regular repertoire in movie theatres, regionally if not worldwide, but Park Hoon-jung’s Night in Paradise landed on Netflix instead earlier this year. We might blame it on the pandemic, but the fact is that the streaming services are expanding regardless of it.

As a screenwriter, Park is best known for his work with Kim Jee-won on the iconic serial killer flick I Saw the Devil (2010), but as a director, his most breakthrough work would be his second feature, New World (2013). The latter was a crime drama with a dash of action and gangster epic, so it is somewhat expected for the filmmaker to go back to the familiar territory after more or less successful excursions to other genres, like historical adventure (Daeho), spy flick (V.I.P.) and supernatural mystery action (The Witch: Part 1 – The Subversion whose sequel is already announced.

Our protagonist Park Tae-gu (Eom Tae-goo, glimpsed in I Saw the Devil and The Age of Shadows) is a mid-level gangster in the clan lead by the old and weary Mr Yang (Park Ho-san). His sister urges him to consider a change in career before it is too late, but Tae-gu thinks that there is still job that needs to be done. After his sister and the cute niece are killed in an assassination masked as a car accident, Tae-gu and his boss are quick to blame the rival clan lead by Chairman Doh (Son Byung-ho) and Mr Yang greenlights his employee’s idea to assassinate the rival boss.

In the aftermath of the assassination, Tae-gu has to run and hide on Jeju Island until Yang joins him and the two get away to Vladivostok. The hiding place is at the house the former gangster Kuto (Lee Gi-yeong) whose schtick is packing the arms he sells in smelly fish. Kuto’s niece Jae Yeon (the up-and-coming actress Jeon Yeo-bin) who is dying of a mystery disease also lives there and, after the initial mistrust, the two outcasts forge an unlikely alliance to survive, to die or to kill for each other. Meanwhile, in Seoul, Yang’s war does not go as planned, especially after Doh is succeeded by an even more ruthless Director Ma (Cha Seung-won), and the police captain Park (Lee Mun-shik) has to interfere and set up negotiations where some pawns have to be sacrificed.

There is a lot of stuff to be enjoyed in Night in Paradise, like the nihilistic attitude about the honour among the gangsters, occasionally clever plotting, masterful shot framing and action set pieces directing by Park Hoon-jung, laced with some unashamed melodrama and operatic tone. Park also proves to be a clever visual storyteller and a master user of metaphors, such as the rotating tray on the negotiations table that signals how luck quickly turns.

The trouble with the screenplay is, however, that some of the sharper turns and plot twists needed some deeper motivation and Park did not make an effort to develop it. For instance, the friendship/romance angle between Tae-gu and Jae Yeon feels completely unexplored, and her disease is used as a generic movie excuse to make her desperate enough to lean on another soon-to-be-dead “loser”. Probably the biggest flaw of the film would be its unnecessary long runtime of over two hours that is mostly felt at the beginning of the film while the plot still slaloms through the expected checkpoints.

On the other hand, there is a lot of craft involved in making Night in Paradise (which is, by the way, an awfully generic title) from all the parties involved. The characters from the gangster milieu are interesting and unique, with their own perfectly defendable angles, which helps the actors to make their portraits quite compelling. Played by Park Ho-san and Cha Seung-won, Yang and Ma could reach the status of the iconic movie gangsters. On the other hand, the leads Eom Tae-gu and Jeon Yeo-bin seemingly have less work to do and less things to show with their characters, but the calibration of the acting performances on their side is good enough for a viewer to buy them completely. Coolly lensed by the veteran cinematographer Kim Young-ho that subtly highlights the differences between the busy city and the “paradise” island under the building threat of touristic gentrification, Night in Paradise is also an eye-candy and a film worth seeing even at home.

A Film a Week - Holiday

Dealing with some topics and tropes can be touchy nowadays. Let us say rape or any form of violence against women, if done by a male filmmaker will always have, rightfully so, a shadow of the doubt about his intentions. Are they purely noble? Inquisitive? Political? Some form of activism? How about attention grabbing? Or simply voyeuristic, maybe even sadistic and misogynistic? Luckily, the director of Holiday, a film that has a brutal rape scene at its very centre, is a woman. The debutant in feature length format, Isabella Eklöf, also co-wrote the script together with Johanne Algren. The new set of rules applies, the film can even be regarded as subversive and therefore a perfect companion piece to a French feminist rape and revenge thriller simply called Revenge, directed by Coralie Fargeat.

It might seem like a long shot, having in mind that Revenge is pretty fast and furious, yet stylishly done action flick with more than a hint of bloodshed, while Holiday is a slow-burning gangster drama constructed around a love triangle with only one murder very late in it (and that murder is purely accidental). However, there are a lot of things in common on the surface level as well as in deeper character analysis to bring the two films together.

The list of similarities starts with the leading characters, even their physical appearance (both are lean, petite blondes) and the girly-girl style (or the lack of style to speak of). When we first see Revenge’s Jenny, she seems to be a stupid girl chasing some instant fame and falling for a good-looking sleazeball that is her boyfriend. Later on we can assume that she is an archetypical female in the male world, pretending to be anything the men around her want her to be, thinking that she would profit from that kind of behaviour. Holiday’s Sascha (played unapologetically and in stunning fashion by Victoria Carmen Sonne) is also a stupid girl of sorts, a gangster’s girlfriend so materialistic that she easily gets addicted to attention, gifts and the luxurious lifestyle without having any real clue what is actually going on. Only in the end, after the crucial rape scene (and due to it), we as the viewers can ask ourselves whether she is an intelligent, calculating psychopath in development.

The case for Sascha’s stupidity is a strong one in the beginning. Having spent all her money, she tries to seduce her boyfriend’s boss, a Danish mafia kingpin residing in Turkish resort town of Bodrum, she was supposed to give message to. She fails the loyalty test and also as a seductress and even gets slapped a couple of times for trying to climb up the ladder too fast. However, when her boyfriend Michael (Lai Yde) comes and covers her with attention and gifts, everything seems fine and she fits well in the gangster “family” (which actually seems like an extended family together with girlfriends / wives and children of different ages) occupying a hillside villa overlooking the bay. Michael might call her “princess”, but there is something cold and threatening about him, so Sascha starts hanging around a friendly-looking and kind-hearted Dutch man named Thomas (Thijs Römer) she has accidentally met at the ice cream shop. But her luck is about to change…

The good thing Eklöf does is leaving most of the circumstances clouded by mystery. It was a gamble, but it paid of. What are they doing in Bodrum except for enjoying the sea and the sun? It is some kind of business, but we do not get to know the details. We do not need them anyway. Also, the moment Michael gets bored with Sascha and turns abusive to her is hard to pinpoint, as well as his motive for such behavior. Did his boss tell him of his encounter with her? Did he find out about her relationship with Thomas and get jealous? Did he get angry about something work-related (there is a scene of roughing-up an associate that messed something up, also unexplained)? Did he just get bored for no reason? Was he planning the whole act all along as a psychopath would do?

Eklöf got lucky or, more probably, played it really clever and cool with another bluff: the structure of the film. The whole first half serves as the exposition filled with low-intensity events and glimpses into the group dynamics. So all the chips came down to the disturbing prolonged rape scene spiced up by forced oral sex, staged and filmed in one frame with such confidence that no veteran director would be ashamed of. And it worked perfectly, adding layers to characters, especially Sascha and shifting motivation, while keeping the deliberately moderate pace, making Holiday completely fresh in the terms gangster films done from a distinctively female point of view, more interested in psychology than in action.