Samaritan Girl

Kim Ki-Duk is one of the most controversial and polarising film makers working in the world cinema today. He is mainly famous for the violent and sordid psycho-sexual melodramas that he made early in his career, specially The Isle and Bad Guy. After making his rather nasty reputation with those films he surprised critics and fans with a very restrained and elegiac Buddhist fable Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring and then following it up a melancholy love story 3-Iron. There was violence in these films too but that remained mostly in background and was always shown in an oblique and artistically mature manner. His latest film, Samaritan Girl, which won silver bear at the Berlin film festival last year, continues the same tradition of his last two films.

The film is about two beautiful school girls who resort to prostitution so that they can save money and fulfill their dream of visiting Europe. The film is divided into three parts. The first part, "Vasumitra", starts with one of girls reciting the story of a (mythical?) Indian prostitute of the same name, whose clients turned devout Buddhist after having sex with her. The film then goes on to make a violent mockery of this naive and sentimental belief in the nurturing and spiritual potential of sexuality, as we see one of the girls managing the transactions and the other sleeping with her middle-age clients, to make some fast buck. The events come to tragic conclusion when one of the girls (who was prostituting herself) jumps off from a window and dies following a surprise police raid. In the second part, "Samaria", which seems like a bizarre perversion of the Christian idea of "the good Samaritan", the second girl decides to atone for her sins by sleeping with all the men who slept with her friend (actually, it is suggested that they were more than just friends) and also returning their money back. The situation gets complex when the girl's father, who is still recovering from his wife's (unexplained) death comes to know about the sordid degradation that his daughter is subjecting herself to. He then starts stalking the men and finally murders one of them in a typically brutal manner.

The third part, "Sonata", tries to tie everything together when the father and daughter go on an idyllic vacation and try to confront their own inner demons without telling each other anything. The film ends bafflingly when the father after giving his daughter preliminary driving lessons, leaves her alone and surrenders himself to the police. But only after he has seen his daughter crying silently in the night, and thus making sure of her essential virtuousness. An article in the Senses of Cinema notes that:

It is with this refreshing sense of hope, combined with an astute eye for social detail and aesthetic composition, that Kim creates one of the most profoundly moving and strangely transcendent metaphoric images of intruded-upon (and violated) landscape in recent cinema, in the final shot of Samaritan Girl: the errant sight of a wobbling, out of control car struggling to chase a sports utility vehicle through a flooded gravel road in the rural countryside, doggedly navigating the inhospitable terrain using an innate compass that elusively, but transfixedly, points home.

The film does manage to express its ideas about religious and spiritual yearning, sin and guilt, quite eloquently, but overall the style and the metaphors the film uses to do this are too direct, explicit and literal. Some of the scenes are also quite unconvincing because the characters appear not human beings but artificial carriers of the misanthropic world view of their creator. I don't have any problem with misanthropy but this one looked fake. But all these quibbles notwithstanding, the film did manage to leave me with a faint ache in the heart which stayed with me for quite some time, along with the angelic faces of the two girls. And that was sufficient reward for me for the time spent watching it. However, Jonathan Rosenbaum doesn't agree with this.