A Bittersweet Life (a bastardisation of the original title which translates to "The Sweet Life", because irony is a lost art) is very eager to tell the audience that it isn't fucking around. "Get the hell out of my way" it says to the opening credits as cameras swoop and fly and track in a whirlwind with Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) in the eye, finishing his meal and methodically going about his job as an employee of crime boss Kang (Kim Yeong-chol), effortlessly dispatching a group of rowdy thugs from a high-class hotel. This almost-wordless, frenetic opening sequence is almost all the character introduction we get for the rest of the film, and woe betide the audience member who isn't paying attention.
From there things fall into place fairly neatly. In a nutshell, Sun-woo is left to mind the shop for Kang while he's in Shanghai for a few days and is for the first time forced to re-evaluate his lifestyle for reasons that are not made explicit until the end of the film, if ever, but are easy enough to guess at, and he commits a couple of fuck-ups that leave him at the mercy of his own boss as well as rival kingpin President Baek (Hwang Jeong-min). With nowhere to run and seemingly nothing to live for, Sun-woo grits his teeth and swears revenge on everyone involved and from there it's off to the races.
It's a pretty well-worn story, but that's hardly a complaint in the face of where it allows director Kim Jee-woon to take things. He cites Le Samourai and Scarface (a combination which should already have eyebrows raised) as inspirations, but there's obviously more than a few overt influences at work here. The strongest voice in the film, however, is plainly that of Kim Jee-woon, and when he e.g. brazenly lifts a shot straight from Taxi Driver it's done to dynamo effect, one of a dozen grace notes that make the film just that little bit richer.
Jee-Woon is known primarily for being a bit of a magpie with genre, cherrypicking imagery, plot elements and techniques from any number of diverse and questionably compatible kinds of films and weaving them together into his own elaborate tapestry. The core of this particular frankenstein's monster is undoubtedly film-noir, with all the monochromatic palette and rise-and-fall, me-against-the-world plot setup you'd expect to follow. Following probably less expectedly are fight scenes staged like a martial arts movie or a climactic shootout that looks for all the world like a Hong Kong action movie or a handful of scenes that are straight-up gangster pastiche or so-on. It's a testament to Jee-woon's own strong visual sensibility that he's able to make it feel like part of a unified whole, in addition to being damn snazzy moment-to-moment.
And make no mistake, the thing looks fucking snazzy. I already mentioned the traditional noir colour scheme and all the delightful, shadowy compositions that it entails, but it's accompanied by flawless* cinematography that makes everything look shiny and sleek and Expensive in a very pointed and deliberate way as well as a handful of motifs that serve to provide the thematic meat and potatoes without ever forcing the script to slow everything down and throw the audience a bone to chew on. Combined with wonderful arrhythmic, abrupt editing it results in a film as driven as its protagonist that feels about a third as long as its two-hours-on-the-nose running time, and that's never a bad thing.
It's these visual reminders of the sheer inconsequence of Sun-woo's lost lifestyle that let A Bittersweet Life, like fellow genre-bending revenge story Kill Bill (and dammit I was trying so very hard to avoid comparisons to Tarantino or Miike in this review), have its cake and eat it too, providing a slick and exciting thriller edifice while constantly reminding us just how unfulfilling it ultimately is. That's overselling it all a wee bit though, though - A Bittersweet Life is first and foremost a crowd-pleaser, and an enormously successful one. That it is a formally audacious and unusually thoughtful one to boot is simply the icing on a cake that is very sweet indeed.
*Assuming that the lousy colour reproduction was a feature of the DVD I was watching and not the film.
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