Exhausted

Gok Kim

Korea, Republic of

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Synopsis

For mature audiences: the film explores with irony the concepts of beauty through ugliness and disturbance and of energy through excess and expenditure.

REVIEW

A young man finds a young woman who plays in the mud and pimps her out for money. He distributes flyers that read "We have a woman." The woman tries to escape from him, but forcibly or voluntarily keeps being drawn back to him.

On the surface, one can say that the film, "Exhausted," might focus on an evil man's exploitation of a naïve woman and on the toll of gender hierarchy. This is no less true, as a matter of fact, in that the motif of the story includes masochism, sadism, homosexuality, prostitution, violence, sodomy, and pornographic representation. However, the film becomes much more profound and complex as the story evolves, and we must not simply make ethical or moral judgments about the representation of sex and violence in the film; rather, it portrays the metaphysical search for the meanings of energy and beauty. It is an existentially intellectual and intellectually existential film. 

More remarkably, the film explores, with irony, the concepts of beauty through ugliness and disturbance, and of energy through excess or expenditure (in Bataille's terms). The man's obsession with the woman, the woman's resistance, violence, and anomalous sex, all signify the explosion as well as the source of energy that has to be wasted or exhausted in order to be recycled. The cinematic landscape of a bleak industrial place-"dystopia," including factories, smoking chimneys, mud, wire fences, and (ill)legal foreign workers-plays into a language of existential or metaphysical beauty. The coarse texture of black and white and the use of 8mm film, which invokes a scene of post-nuclear war in which energy is completely depleted, adds a sense of excess or expenditure to the stark surfaces of the human body and the landscape. As the film goes on, more shocking graphics appear during the last thirty minutes to finally bring the viewer to the apex of exhaustion.    

Exhausted is not the kind of film that one is meant to watching. In fact, it would make you extremely uncomfortable and tired. Nevertheless, it is a kind of film that one can appreciate. Therefore, the film cannot be considered as a trite example of experimental independent films and therefore too quickly dismissed because it lies "beyond the principle of (cinematic) pleasure." It is truly a mature, intellectually challenging, and beautiful film. 

-Meera Lee