Year in Review - 2002 (Feature) No Exit: Another Act in American Immigration Policy, Post-Sept. 11 (in National News) Upcoming Welfare Cut to Hurt APA Families (in Bay Area News) Ultimate Diversions: 2002 Gamer's Gift Guide (11/29/02) (in Consumer) APA Community Should Tell Shaquille O’Neal to ‘Come down to Chinatown.’ (in Sports) Hot ‘n’ Sour: Primal Scream (in A&E) INS Roundups Put Nation’s Growing Ethnic Media in Bind (in Opinion)

Primal Scream

‘The Isle’ navigates the uncharted, cruel waters of love

Every man — and woman — is an island in Kim Ki-Duk’s 2000 film, The Isle. In the filmmaker’s far-from-idyllic world, appetite is all, primal instincts and desires run amok, isolation is inevitable and the South Korean waterscape is awash with guts, blood and bodily fluids.

This symbolism-drenched art house drama isn’t your mom and pop’s Survivor or even your grandpappy’s Island of Dr. Moreau. Kim gets microscopic and makes do with a few evocative locales, achingly gorgeous cinematography, and some wildly inventive imagery that’s intense enough to set your teeth on autogrind. This is a bell-jar love story as imagined by a biting, subtle surrealist like Max Ernst, complete with scarring scenes reminiscent of that moment in Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou when a razor blade is dragged across a woman’s eyeball. Simultaneously repellent and seductive, The Isle makes you want to protect your soft body parts, while keeping one eye peeled to find out what happens next.

The Isle opens on a dreamscape straight out of an eons-old oil painting, accompanied by an impressionistic score by Jeon Sang-Yoon. On a beautiful lake, cloaked in pearly mists and surrounded by picture-perfect hills, a mute girl, Hee Jin (Suh Jung), leads a solitary life by the water, keeping her own kind of Bates Motel. She grimly rows her lodgers — rough fishermen and their girlfriends and whores — to a set of colorful houses on anchored rafts and silently tends to their needs, supplying them with coffee, food, bait and sometimes her own sexual services in exchange for cash.

It’s all business, although Hee Jin isn’t immune to the random acts of nastiness delivered by her callous customers. And she isn’t above grabbing an insulting customer by his bottom, when he isn’t looking, and pulling him into the dark water.

That dynamic shifts when a bookish, furtive young man, Hyun-Shik (Kim Yu-Suk), appears one day and sets up quiet housekeeping with a pet bird in a yellow raft dwelling near Hee Jin. Troubled and clearly on the run, he attempts suicide with a handgun but is saved when a mysterious spear, poked through his raft’s timbers, stabs him in the leg and makes him drop the gun into the lake. Weaponless, helpless and adrift, he watches the water, twists fishing wire into whimsical sculptures, and studies his (inn)keeper as intently as she gazes on him.

The pair engages in an almost wordless tango of fear and fascination, until police boats come in search of fugitives and Hyun-Shik frantically attempts suicide by swallowing a string of fishhooks.

Amazingly it doesn’t end there. Life on the water, it seems, is never quite as cut and dried as the nightcrawlers the girl bites in half to bait her hooks. Fishing lines are the only straight and narrow things here. Instead, pain and the caregiving and healing that follow draw the sadomasochistic couple closer — until a hooker takes a liking to Hyun-Shik. Hee Jin deals with the situation with the offhand brutality that marks the rest of her everyday existence.

All this may sound ugly but The Isle is anything but. Kim baits his line with gorgeous visuals and iconographic moments of casual cruelty that stick in the mind like golden fishhooks. A woman with the fierce face of a demon pulls herself out of the water, propped up by a dagger stuck in a boat. A human is reeled in like a flounder, a fishing line clenched between the lips. A man slices off the sides of a fish to make sashimi and releases it into the water where it swims agonizingly until it is caught again, its ribs still bloody.

The director/screenwriter’s vision of male-female relationships is far from pretty. It’s full of gristle, convoluted body language, mixed messages and passionate bloodletting. Is Hee Jin the keeper of Hyun-Shik or vice versa? Kim keeps everything free-floating while encapsulating the claustrophobic attraction, destructive gestures and alternating immersion and isolation of love in a simple fable-like narrative structure. In the end, in a final montage that brings to mind In the Realm of the Senses, The Isle comes off like a primal scream straight from an unsullied avant-garde sensibility, unafraid to attempt a last bold, mad image of a man and woman who forsake reality and instead, choose to escape into each other.

The Isle shows Jan. 3 through 9 at Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinemas, S.F. and Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas, Berkeley. Call 415-352-0810 or 510-843-FILM or visit www.landmarktheatres.com.