Saturday, October 23, 2010

To the White Cliffs

Thirst (2009)
directed by Chan-Wook Park
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot compared Chan-Wook Park to Sam Mendes, and that's appropriate. It would be difficult to say whose films I like less, but Thirst was complicated (or simplified, given the absurd plot) by tiny subtitles inside the 2.35:1 aspect ratio. I want my subtitles legible, superimposed, and white as the driven snow, but when I couldn't understand what Ok-bin Kim said, I could at least watch her face and wish her a better movie somewhere down the line.

There's little worse than a director who's long on style but short on substance catching the religious bug and stretching an already interminable try on my patience into a catalogue of crucifixes, communions, and confessionals. John Carpenter's Vampires could have been another Leopard Man, but for that Vatican hocus pocus and more than a little late-career bitterness about box office failure as professional emasculation. Park is no Carpenter, and no one eats an octopus this time around.

Rather, Thirst is a kind of black comedy that's only funny in the last few minutes, when feuding vampire lovers argue about whether both of them deserve to die for the murders they've committed. Their lone sanctuary from the rising sun is either inside or beneath a tiny car that the man (a former priest) drove to the edge of a cliff for the express purpose of committing suicide. His paramour enjoys being a vampire more than she's enjoyed anything her entire life, and objects to the priest speaking for both of them.

So she tries to stay alive. She burrows in the dirt; he drives forward ten feet. She gets in the trunk; he rips it off and hurls it into the sea. The end plays out almost wordlessly, a brief respite at the conclusion of a long, noisy crawl.

Put another way, the less said, the better.