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130, Suyeonggangbyeon-daero,
Haeundae-gu, Busan, Republic of Korea,
48058
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- DATABASE
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Archive
DATABASE
TIMELESS, BOTTOMLESS
Sep 23, 2019
- Writer by Pierce Conran
- View1933
1997 | 125 MIN | Drama
DIRECTOR JANG Sun-woo
CAST HAN Seul-gi, JANG Nam-gyeong
RELEASE DATE August 2, 1997
CONTACT Miracin Korea
Tel +82 2 3445 8775
Fax +82 2 3445 8744
One of the pioneering figures of cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, comfortable across a range of genres and never hesitating to be controversial through works such as The Age of Success (1988), The Road To Race Track (1991) and A Petal (1996), JANG Sun-woo was not one to repeat himself, and true to form he closed out the 21st century with the fiercely experimental Timeless, Bottomless (aka Bad Movie), one of the most singular Korean features ever committed to film.
A mix of scripted vignettes and documentary footage, with the occasional animated scene thrown in for good measure, JANG’s work uses a grainy and shaky video aesthetic to explore figures living on the ultimate fringes of society in Seoul, including delinquent teenagers and drunken vagrants on death’s doorstep.
The immediate impression that the film gives off is one of haphazard chaos, as JANG deliberately keeps the aesthetic lo-fi and scrambled, and refuses to offer the audience an easy narrative to latch onto. Several characters do appear throughout the film and while they go through their own arcs, the general tone remains largely impressionistic as we are lead to feel the frazzled confusion of a society in flux rather than get a strong impression of any particular individuals.
While the cast is largely amateur and also features real people being filmed on the streets, it does features several small, early roles for future luminaries of Korean cinema, including PARASITE’s SONG Kang-ho, who appears in one brief scene, and particularly KI Joo-bong of Hotel by the River (2018), who pops several times as one of the subway-dwelling vagrants.
Though Timeless, Bottomless gives off the illusion of being a messy piece of counter cultural art, JANG Sun-woo’s cinematic mastery does shine through, as he carefully orchestrates the seeming chaos on screen, creating something truly unique that, while frequently challenging and confrontational, nevertheless manages to paint a fascinating portrait of a diffuse subculture emerging within a city slowly extracting itself from decades of political, economic and social hardship.
JANG has made two films since Timeless, Bottomless, swapping out that film’s lo-fi aesthetic for the erotic melodrama Lies (2000) and the sci-fi opus Resurrection of the Little Match Girl, which was the most expensive Korean movie ever made at the time of its release in 2002.
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