Entry 015: "Duelist"

Dear Internet,

                "Duelist" is a 2005 South Korean film set in an ambiguous historical period.  By ambiguous, I mean anytime from late 1300 to about 1900. The plot revolves around a counterfeit ring and the group of detectives that seek to capture the criminals.  As the plot progresses, the counties begins to fall apart as more and more of the counterfeit coins appear or are thought to appear.  The prices of common goods go up.  The poor starve, and the rich slow major trade to a standstill.  Politicians bicker among themselves like always.  Eventually, the group of detectives trace the conspiracy all the way up the political ladder and must confront the man responsible who attempts to topple the leader of the kingdom.  Does that sound good to you, Internet?  Maybe that sound like a nice movie to watch?  Well it is not.

                I have not mentioned the romantic sub-plot that completely dominates the movie to the point of groaning.  One of the detectives is female Namsoon, a hot tempered woman whose antics make it difficult to believe that she could be in law enforcement.  She is always ready to use physical force to get her way or information out of people.  Her brash nature and frown of displeasure is so foremost that it makes her unlikable.  Compound that with her nervous behavior when confronted by the titular character creates an attempt to evoke the tired trope of "hard on the outside, but soft on the inside."  The way the movie handles it is desperate at best, especially when Namsoon is portrayed panicky at the thought of having to spend the night with the man to prevent blowing her cover while operating incognito.  She is not much of a detective if she loses her cool so easily.  

                Then there is "Sad Eyes."  Yes, Sad Eyes.  The titular character is never referred to with a proper name.  He is only nicknamed thus.  Sad Eyes is the typical pretty boy that has become dominating of romance movies.  He has next to no lines through the movie, which is not something that most characters have actually.  Sometimes there are ten minute breaks or more before anyone says anything.  He is supposed to be a troubled man, which we are supposed to tell from his quiet demeanor.  Half the time that he is on screen he is dancing or fighting, which the movie takes great pride in merging together.  Sad Eyes is a shallow character who the movie wants the audience to instantly fall in love with in the same manner that Namsoon does so.  The movie tries to present the two starry eyes individuals as star crossed lovers, doomed to never be together because they are on different sides of the law.  In reality they spend more times trying to stab one another than times where they talk to one another.  Which leads back to the comment about fighting and dancing.

Look how dark and mysterious he is.

                Throughout the film, various characters duke it out with swords and knives.  It becomes apparent that the fights are next to absent with any attempt to stab one another.  The choreography mimics a few dance styles, I am sure, but it subtracts the intent of the characters out of the scene.  When one character is supposed to be fighting for his life, he probably would not be spinning as much as he is and making himself dizzy in the process or turning his back on his enemy as often.  The soundtrack adds to this dance with electric guitars playing sometimes melded with classical, sometimes juxtaposed next to it.  Non-period music piece is almost always done wrong when it comes to period settings.  The only time it might work is in a comedy, but here it weight heavily detracting from the mood.  The nature of making the scene into a performance rather than follow the purpose of the scene highlights the biggest problem with "Duelist." 

                The movie is in love with itself.  It comes across as being heavily artsy, which is apparent in the choreography and the imagery.  The problem with this is that there is no substance to back the artistic flare being used.  Numerous technical tricks plague the film because it attempt to use them instead of straightforward storytelling.  In more than one scene, a character will deliver a line that will surprise another, and the film will stop dead for a second or two.  Everything freezes for an instant and the music stops.  At first I thought that my media player had become buggy or some other technological error occurred, but, no, other camera techniques dotted the movie.  Another time the frame rate dropped to a crawl in a fight scene, while Sad Eyes was silhouetted by the moon, not by the moonlight, by the moon itself.  There is so much slow motion shots that the film could be cut by maybe twenty minutes if it was played always at full speed.  What it boils down to is the movie is pretentious.  It expects the viewer to instantly connect to the characters and plot, which took about 23 minutes before explaining what was going on, with little work on its end.  The film spends the first three minutes with a tall tale being told in a bar that has absolutely nothing to do with the story and just jerks the audience around.

                "Duelist" is a bad movie.  I wish I had spent my two hours on something else like learn to knit so that I could do something with my hands while watching subtitled movies instead of taking notes of a movie that tries too hard in the wrong direction.  If the film had no romantic subplot, it would have been a great story.  Instead, it feels shoehorned in and overly dependent on emotional dandruff that relies on the audience injecting their own feelings rather than creating a moving narrative that the audience then responds to.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S.  From now on I will try to tell you what the next item will be in case you wish to follow along.  For Monday: "Metroid: Other M"