Lies (1999) is an obscure Korean film that I wouldn’t have heard of at all if a co-worker hadn’t been wearing a Korean t-shirt he randomly acquired around the library. An African-American customer who could read Korean (she knows several languages, I once tested her on our Google Translate device) recognized the Korean inscription which was, I believe, Gojitmal (there’s also a different spelling and name for the film too, which made it even more difficult to find/acquire) which has multiple meanings I think but is summarized as Lies, and which she recognized as this infamous film about the sexual relationship between a sculptor in his late 30s and an 18 year old college student in socially conservative South Korea. She had borrowed it from the library and seen it, but she cautioned me about watching it but did want to have a conversation with me about it once I did but was always warning me, and squeamish, about the content. I told her I had no problem with any content, not only do I love foreign films, but provocative Korean art/crime films are particularly up my alley. I couldn’t find it on Netflix, had difficulty locating it on IMDb and even the library’s two copies (thankfully they had it, since it’s almost impossible to get otherwise) didn’t easily appear on the catalog either. What was so licentious about this film that it was so difficult to get even in our very free age? Well, I got a chance to watch it in January 2020 before my cancelled foreign trip to Asia. While it is wall-to-wall filled with increasingly S&M sex, it’s nothing like the Marquis De Sade or films like 120 Days of Sodom, In the Realm of the Senses etc. Unlike those films, this is a low-budget production with only three main characters and simple sets, but like those films, this is no amateurish by-the-numbers porn flick, but a brilliant piece of filmmaking by a true master. The repetitive nature of the scenes and the evolving/devolving relationship is a simultaneous cry of rebellion and act of contrition towards an increasingly regimented and conservative age. A brief comment on the filmmaker (Sun Woo-Jang, who had made many previous films but apparently would direct only one more) on the film’s extras really brought home the message of the film. He said it was a “different point-of-view” given the fact that the IMF had recently “taken over” and increasingly corporatized the South Korean economy. I recall 1999 as being the year of the Seattle anti-globalization protests and similar protests worldwide. In this country the Glass-Steagall act had been repealed along with many banking restrictions that would eventually lead to the 2008 Financial Crisis. Companies were buying companies, wealth was being concentrated, independent filmmaking, once relatively easy to create and produce and at its heyday of fame in the mid-90s, was increasingly being squeezed out. 9/11 only added nationalism to the corporatism already built up. Social media initially increased voices, and still does, but now with more and more fake news, memes and political propaganda, and it being controlled by a relatively small elite, we face the same issues yet again. It’s interesting that such a short, obscure, low-budget film can provoke such thought in a person, but it did in me. And therein lies the insidious genius of Lies (1999).

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0208995/