Park Chan-wook is on record saying that he's actually more ashamed of this film that his first, The Moon is...The Sun's Dream, and for the first hour, I didn't get it. The film was darkly amusing, light on its feet, and a surprisingly good time. The behind the scenes information on the film is scant, as far as I can tell, and the only major piece of information I can find is that the production company changed hands halfway through production which changed the tone of the rest of shooting. If the film was made in chronological order, I can see it, because the blackly comic edges of the film suddenly fall away at a certain point and are replaced by a sense of almost weepy melodrama. It doesn't quite kill the film, but oh boy does it drag it down a whole lot.

Ahn (Lee Geung-young) is a saxophonist and former criminal who did time who also a penchant for suicide attempts that fail. He has a close friend whom he calls a brother in Moon (Kim Min-jong). When Ahn finds his wife having an affair, he steals his daughter from her, hands her off to his mother-in-law, and tries to kill himself one more time, only saved by Moon beeping him right then. They meet up, and Moon needs Ahn's brilliance to help him rob a bank, but they rob the cafe they're in instead where they meet Maria (Jeong Seon-kyeong), unafraid to look them in the eye when they rob her. She ends up connected to them, uses them to steal her baby from an orphanage. What's easy to tell from this is that the film really doesn't have much of a direction. There are talks of big scores, but ultimately it's more of a comedy of errors as these three team up to go on entertaining tangents. Can that sustain for a full film? Well, we don't really know because the film goes sentimental.

After an unthinking heist of a woman's car, an ironic car theft happens to them, taking the money they've stolen as well as Maria's baby. This is obviously still room for that dark comedy, but a shift steadily takes over here, a shift towards heavier tones and melodrama. The three split up, Ahn becoming obsessed with finding the saxophone that he had pawned but was sold, Maria going to look for her baby, and Moon just kind of tagging along with Ahn because he not only doesn't have anywhere else to go, but he's also being chased by his former gangster pals because he started the movie killing one in an execution. The whole lost baby subplot ends up feeling both resolved and unresolved at the same time (Ahn figures out what happened, but we never get confirmation, so it ends up feeling like some kind of dangling participle at the end of a sentence). They all end up in a Catholic convent where Maria had studied before she had discovered herself to be pregnant, and we get the full transition to that melodramatic tone.

And I just don't think it works. The film hadn't been building up to it at all. Everything was detached from that tone up until that convent because the events were being played for darkly comic laughs. So, when Ahn challenges Moon to shoot him, referencing a masochist begging a sadist for pain and the sadist refusing it (meant to reflect Ahn's need for death through his suicide attempts), it's delivered in this heavy tone that doesn't fit the rest of the film. And I just don't connect with it anymore. The comedy is gone, replaced by this sense of foreboding.

The entire final act ends up being Moon and Maria holed up in a warehouse after their disguises as nuns failed to work while Ahn tries to reconnect with his daughter and wife but gets hit by the gangsters after Moon. Again, it's all heavy tones as the character go through their final movements of the plot, and none of it connects because the film hadn't been built for it.

Was this change in tone because of the change in ownership of the production? It seems like a safe guess, and probably one of the big reasons that Park has tried to suppress the film. He would later prove that he could do heavier feeling drama in successive films, and he'd also prove that he could manage the balance of black humor and heightened, operatic drama as well. However, the film has to be built for it from the start. You can't just change gears 2/3 of the way through production.

Is it bad overall for that? I wouldn't go that far. It's certainly better than Park's first film. The opening hour is honestly really fun in that black humor sort of way, and the final half-hour isn't terrible, it just doesn't work with the first hour. The overall product is a disappointment, but that first hour still sings on its own. I don't know if turning the film off after the baby is kidnapped would be a great recommendation because no plot lines would be close to be resolved, but you'd get the maximum entertainment you can get out of the film.

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