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An only modestly talented artist who draws portraits of people for
money in a park seems to be the perfect underdog: he is harrassed by
racketeers, verbally abused and cheated by his costumers, and nobody seems
to take him seriously. Nobody but maybe that woman following him around
with a video camera as if she was his shadow, and who eventually leads him
to a theatre stage where he meets his alter ego/evil self/dark guru, who
helps him to release the rage the artist has been bottling up over the
years, turns him from a virtual nobody into an avenging angel who now goes
out to avenge himself on all those who have wronged him - starting with
his alter ego. From now on, the artist walks through the city and
slaughters all those who have mistreated him in the past, including the
racketeers and a cop investigating his killing spree - and while he's on
his revenge trip, he seems to be virtually indestructible, as if his
mission gave him invulnerability. The artist's last victim is the woman
with the videocamera that has indirectly led to his outburst of rage, and
once she's gone, he returns to his place in the park to continue to lead
the insignificant life he has lived, and when the puppet-vendor next to
him gets into a fight with racketeers, he, who was Mr Indestructible only
minutes ago, doesn't even raise a finger to help him. A
vendetta movie, done the Kim Ki-duk way: Not everything makes sense, and
isn't supposed to, the focus isn't on violence or on the film's main
character (who remains intentionally empty throughout) but on the (often
bizarre) situations surrounding the in itself bizarre central storyline,
and somehow, Kim Ki-duk tells a well-kinown story in this film in a way it
has never been told before. And yet, Real Fiction is not one of
Kim Ki-duk's better films, basically because it lacks the poetic images of
his masterpieces from The Isle to Time
that give his absurd and unique stories an extra dimension, and the reason
for this might be found in the actual production story of the film: Real
Fiction, an 80 minutes film, was filmed in a mere 3 hours, and
everything was shot in just one take - and while this doesn't really show
on film (if you were oblivious of the fact, you really couldn't tell), you
also can't help but thinking that a little more care (and time of course)
could have done the film a heap of good. That said, even as it is, Real
Fiction is a pretty unusual film, not perfect maybe, but pretty
interesting nevertheless.
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