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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Tuesday, November 02, 2010

entry arrow3:38 AM | With Some Regrets



I am a little ambivalent about Korean director Leesong Hee-il’s debut film No Regrets [2006], only because the film seems to fall apart spectacularly midway through its running time when the romance finally blooms between orphan hustler Sum-in and angst-ridden rich boy Jaemin. If an erstwhile love story follows that broken arc, and then swerves unexpectedly into Chan-wook Park territory when jilted lover tries to bury alive the other — what can you finally say? Is this the height of originality, taking the queer love story into a path never been taken before? Or is this just about a filmmaker fumbling for a story that does not calculate? I’m not sure. Then again, Takashi Miike followed this route in Audition [1999] when what had started to be an ornery story about a career man looking for love suddenly swerved halfway through the film into an intense horror movie, the likes of which had never been seen before. But I could accept Audition’s audacity because of the electricity the actors emanated. The lovers in No Regrets, while intense in their own ways, do not seem to generate anything between them, and what happens to them just happens to them, without any of us invested in their story. I want to like this film. Revise that: I want to like this film more than what I feel right now. But I can’t, for some reason.

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