I'm a cyborg but that's ok
<Saibogujiman kwenchana>

Director: Park Chan-wook

Writers: Jeong Seo-gyeong, Park Chan.wook

Music: Jo Yeong-wook

Cinematography: Jeong Jeong-hun

Cast: Lim Su-jeong, Rain (Jung Ji-hoon), Choi Hie-jin, Kim Byeong-ok, Lee Yong-nyeo, Oh Dal-su

Can wrong expectations really influence the opinion of who’s going to see a movie? The first criticism of I’m a cyborg but that’s ok seems to give a positive answer to the above question. Few days after its presentation at the fifty-seventh Berlin International Film Festival, where Saibogujiman kwenchana won the Alfred Bauer Prize, the movie received the first lukewarm welcome along with accusations of loss of cynicism, pessimism, and wickedness which had distinguished “the Vengeance Trilogy”. Park Chan-wook is not only that. It seems as if irony, friendship, black humour, love and provocation are not part of the director’s abilities. And it seems as if Joint Security Area, Judgement, and N.e.p.a.l., don’t represent Park, or maybe not as much as “the vengeances”. And for those who have made this prior selection, a bit of disappointment came punctual and inevitable. But since the first rumours about the movie, Park Chan-wook said that he wanted to remove the label of bad, violent and cynical filmmaker that the previous trilogy had labelled him with. Park declared that he would wholly change his register, indulging in something more heedless and maybe lighter. Cha Young-goon suffers the forced hospitalisation in a mental hospital after she went mad as a result of continuous family problems: she’s convinced she’s a cyborg, and it’s not only caused by her bizarre behaviour towards the outside world, but also by a more serious alimentary problem. Cha Young-goon is sure she has to recharge herself with current and batteries and she refuses food. Only the affection and the odd brilliance of Park Il-sun, another patient of the mental hospital, will save her life. And they lived happily ever after… On the whole, in the movie there are all the elements of the comedy – the times, the affectionate and comic situations - but the approach is typical of somebody who refuses to tell a fairy tale for teenagers. Who defines this movie a simple transition comedy can’t, or maybe doesn’t want to, see beyond the blanket of mawkish thoughtlessness of the mental hospital. The protagonists’ pathologies as a whole would be enough to elevate the significance of the movie: the ironic mix of sharp humour, unbridled nonsense, and noir-comedy which distinguishes the odd and original figures which people the mental hospital is an immediate symptom of the desire to go beyond the Korean comedy’s limits that we were used to. In this sea of witty remarks, surreal situations, and bizarre dialogues there are two direct stinging blows which inevitably refer to the more political and provocative Park Chan-wook. The attack to the traditional family, through the psychological violence suffered at home by the protagonists, is only the prelude to a more precise accusation against the anachronistic and cold methods of the traditional psychiatry. The movie, with its sequence of colours, sharp and pasteled at the same time, with prevalence of blue, green, and red, with a sedate editing typical of the comedy, alternated by some sequences which don’t mind a sudden upsurge of violence, is firstly a succession of brilliant visual and directing solutions, and secondly a film which suffers enormously within the thin limits that someone seems to have previously fixed.