BIGBANG: The Beginning

The Anatomy of a Fairy Tale Gone Wrong

I have always been amused by the way we clean up fairy tales. We rinse out the blood, the lust, the rotten bargains struck in the dark, and what is left is a tidy little lesson for children. (At some point we apparently decided children needed protecting from the very thing these stories were built on.) Director Yim Pil-sung wants none of that. In *Scarlet Innocence*, he takes the Korean folktale of Shim Cheong—a dutiful tale about a daughter sacrificing herself to the sea god to restore her father's sight—and drags it somewhere dirtier and meaner. What comes out the other side is not piety. It is desire turned rancid.



Jung Woo-sung plays Hak-kyu, a disgraced literature professor exiled to a sleepy rural town after a scandal. Jung is a certified superstar in Korea, usually framed around that immaculate jawline and a kind of stoic heroism. Watching him here is a jolt. He makes Hak-kyu feel morally hollow, the sort of man who ruins people almost absentmindedly because boredom is eating him alive. There is an early moment I keep circling back to: he is sitting at a desk, and the camera lingers on his hand moving across the wood. It is such a small thing, but the way Deok-yi (Esom) watches it—captivated, almost entranced—tells you exactly what kind of trap she is stepping into. Tactile. Dangerous.

Esom is the one holding the film together. This was her first leading role, and the shift she has to pull off is brutal. In the first half, she is a naive 20-year-old amusement park ticket seller, trapped in a town where nothing ever seems to happen. By the second half, eight years later, she has hardened into someone who has cut out whatever mercy she once had in order to pursue revenge. The film splits itself open with that time jump. I am not convinced the transition is completely smooth. Rhythm Zaveri over at *Asian Movie Pulse* noted that the film "stumbles as it shifts gears halfway through, but manages to reach its destination effectively," and that feels right to me. The rural sadness of the first act gives way all at once to gangsters, gambling, and a suffocating apartment in Seoul.



Then again, maybe that lurch is the point. Yim shoots the early country scenes in blooming cherry blossoms and warm, golden light. It passes for a romance. More accurately, it passes for a lie. Once the story leaps ahead, the palette caves in on itself, all claustrophobic shadow and neon glare. Hak-kyu's eyesight is failing. His world is physically narrowing. The camera starts to echo that, smearing the frame's edges and forcing us into his panic with him.



It is a messy, queasy film. At times it leans a little too hard into soap-opera theatrics. But the sheer physical truth of the performances keeps it from floating away. Watch Jung's broad shoulders slowly fold inward as his vision deteriorates, turning a smug predator into something pitiable and fumbling. He is not asking to be forgiven, and the movie is not interested in forgiving him either. It only asks us to watch a man discover, much too late, that the darkness was there from the start.