Sun-woo, elegant of dress and speech, is ostensibly the manager of a four-star restaurant—but we know there is more without being told as such. One night he’s summoned to one of the party rooms to “deal with” an unruly client. He unhurriedly finishes his dessert, adjusts his cuffs, walks downstairs, and politely asks the thuggish man and his cronies to leave. They do not, and that serves as a trigger release: he leaps up onto the table, thrashes them all into submission, and sends them back home to their gangster boss.
Sun-woo (Byung-hun Lee, of JSA and 3-Iron) has been working for seven years as an enforcer for “President” Kang, head of a large Korean crime syndicate. He is still young and handsome, and from what we can tell he was recruited directly into this job without much in the way of formative experiences in the real world. He has never had a real vocation, never fallen in love, and never had his loyalties tested in any significant way. For all of his brutal worldliness he is still in some ways unformed, embryonic—and A Bittersweet Life is, more than anything else, about Sun-Woo growing past his protected world and becoming autonomous, however briefly.
Sun-woo "moonlights" as a restaurant manager, but his real job
is providing expert enforcement work for his mob boss employer Kang.
One day Kang asks him for a favor: Watch over his girlfriend while he’s away in Singapore for three days. Kang is not worried about the girl becoming the target of rival gangs or something equally predictable: he wants to find out if she’s seeing someone else. If she is, Sun-woo is to kill both of them immediately. The younger man’s face doesn’t even so much as flicker when he hears these instructions, but it’s clear this is the first time he’s been asked to do something this … well, this outré. Most of the people he’s killed actually deserved to die.
The girl, Hee-soo, is gentle and talented, a cellist in a chamber music ensemble, and does indeed have a boyfriend of her own. Sun-woo follows them around during the course of one long night, pacing them in his car, amazed at the stamina of young people in love. He is scarcely older than they are in body, but far older in spirit, and at one point when he removes his shirt we see scars on his back that attest to unspoken brutalities given and received. And for the first time, he has been ordered to kill someone whose worst crime has essentially been enjoying one’s life—not someone who has attacked him or insulted his boss’s power, but a talented young woman who enjoys collecting lamps and has no pretenses towards being anything but herself.
When hired to "watch over" his boss's girlfriend, his attitude about his job changes --
namely, that it might simply be wrong to kill someone when they get in the way.
Is he in love with her? I don’t think so. The vast majority of other reviews I’ve read of A Bittersweet Life make that sound like the case, but I am not convinced of that, partly because the movie spends relatively little time with her, or them. She is essentially a catalyst for things that have remained dormant in him for a long time—not romantic love, but a sense of decency, a connectedness to other people that has been kept suppressed. It is senseless for him to kill a man and a woman who have really done nothing to earn it, no matter what his boss has told him. And up until then, the people he’s squared off against have been thugs like him—not bystanders who have great and natural talent and charm.
Sun-woo comes to a decision. He goes to the girl’s house and presents her with an ultimatum: Forget that your boyfriend ever existed, and you can live. She’s shocked and furious, as she rightly should be: who is he, gun or no gun, to tell her how to live? And he realizes he’s failed—not only to follow his boss’s instructions (since he never tells his boss about this “deal”), but to protect her from the consequences of her own actions. Undercutting all of that, though, is another realization: that everyone else might well be wrong, and he might be right, and that understanding might cost him his life.
The film's sudden veering into violent black comedy actually works in its favor,
unlike many other movies that shift gears without warning.
All of this is paralleled with another set of developments in his work. The man he sent home in disgrace at the start of the film was the underling for a competing boss, who has now taken offense and demands an apology. One of Sun-woo’s cohorts chooses to deal with the problem while Kang is away—he brings the guy back to the restaurant, wines and dines him, treats him like royalty. Sun-woo is incensed, not simply because his buddy is doing things “wrong”, but because his own hard work is being undone, and he does not want to have to fight one of his own men as well as their gang rivals.
But he will have to fight, especially after his boss returns and discovers that Sun-woo has not followed his instructions. This leads to one of the movie’s most masterful sequences, a grueling and violent set-piece where Sun-woo is kidnapped first by one faction and then re-kidnapped by his own, beaten, tortured, buried alive, and then escapes even after one of his hands has been smashed with a pipe wrench. What follows from this is even more bizarre and mordantly funny—there’s another extended sequence, where Sun-woo tries to obtain weapons through an underground arms dealer, which plays as grotesque black comedy.
And in the same vein, the final shootout doesn't overshadow
the movie's deeper concerns, but accentuates them.
Asian movies in general, and Korean films in particular, are loaded with instances where they shift gears on the viewer. In the bit with the arms dealer, for instance, there’s a moment that could have been phoned in from a brutal slapstick comedy—where Sun-woo and another man frantically try to assemble pistols in time to blow the other man’s brains out. I laughed when I saw this, but two things came to mind: 1) it’s paralleled almost perfectly by a similar scene in the deadly-serious Korean action thriller Shiri, so I’m wondering if it’s homage, and 2) the movie took much time and care to set up Sun-woo as a real character, and continues to maintain that even through absurd moments like this. Instead of derailing the movie, it adds to it, and it makes Bittersweet Life all the more memorable and startling.
The director, Ji-woon Kim, has been responsible for three more of Korea’s most talked-about movies in recent years: The Quiet Family (from which Takashi Miike derived The Happiness of the Katakuris), The Foul King (which I still have to write about one of these days), and A Tale of Two Sisters (which I also have to write about despite never wanting to see it again). Life is nothing like any of the above movies—its plot is relatively straightforward and untangled, and it’s shot in somber, lovely colors that wrap around the actors like the well-tailored suits they all wear. And as is due most films about criminals, it ends in a massive shoot-out, but as my comments here have hinted there is a lot more on Life’s mind than just finding creative ways to make bullets enter human bodies. Where else other than Korea might you find a noir movie that opens and closes with quotes from Zen Buddhism, and actually makes them relevant?
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