A street artist (Ju Jin-mo) does portraits in a public park square. People don't seem to like his work and a gang of thugs pressures him for payoffs. A young woman silently films him with a camera. The artist follows her into a theater and onto a stage where a man smacks the artist around and riles him into striking out against all those he feels have done him wrong. This sends the artist into maddening vengeful psychotic state- he stabs a woman who crumples up one of his portraits, bludgeons a former teacher, and attacks various others from his girlfriend, to a bullying buddy from the marines, to his ex-fiancee.

The real gimmick of the film is that Kim Ki-duk and crew shot the film in real time, over the course of three hours or so (but the edited it down to a 80 min film), with multiple 35mm and average consumer DV camcorders, and did it all in one take. Why? Well, there is no real reason I could see to shoot the film this way other than to save some money and to say you did it. The sketchy narrative is not helped at all by the gimmick. The only argument you could make for the gimmick aiding the film is that it allows room for one to excuse the sloppy acting and muddled direction.

I was really surprised by how bad this film was. I'm a huge admirer of Kim Ki-duk's work, but Real Fiction pretty much ascribes to all the naysayer's complaints about him - it is blunt, violent, and laughably pretentious. The whole stage performer and camera girl characters are obviously representative of some part of the artist's psyche. It comes off as a little hammy, especially when you set it up on a blank theater stage and have the actors delivering monologues. Though it is obvious he was aiming for some kind of artsy-slasher flick, an exploitative, trashy revenge picture is probably a little more honest.

It is hard not to make comparisons between Kim Ki-duk and the film's main character since both worked as street artists and both were in the military. So, it seems like the character could be his way of striking back at all the ways he felt bullied by the public, girlfriends, the government, society in general. And it comes across just like it sounds, like some amateurish, film school, student film. Sure, there is no reason an artist shouldn't be allowed to work out their personal demons on film, and normally it could yield something interesting. But Real Fiction largely lacks the existential beauty and surreal charms of Kim Ki-duk's other works.

The DVD: Tai Seng

Picture: Anamorphic Widescreen. Non-progressive transfer does a fair job with very rough material. Here you have rough, amateurish film stock and limited DV material to work with, so they both come across looking like student film quality. The image appears to have been stretched vertically. I'm not sure if this was some transfer mistake or some strange aspect ratio compromise they made when merging the film and video. It is not really that distracting because the whole film looks odd anyway.

Checked around for other region DVD releases of the film, and they all seem to have the same complaints that are rooted in the source. The colors appear very gaudy with a heavy lean towards warm hues. Again, this is probably some compromise between the video/film. Basically all the details vary because of the stock used, so the sharpness and contrast levels change depending on the medium. Technically the video bits are obvious and suffer from some conversion distortions/limitations. The filmed bits also, in certain scenes, have some spottiness and dirt issues, probably due to the "one take" rule where the actual camera might not have been as tight and clean as it should have been.

Sound: Again, this all goes back to the source. Sometimes they had the actors miked well, sometimes not. So, there are certain scenes that, if I spoke Korean, I probably couldn't tell what the actors were saying because the dialogue levels were recorded low or cluttered by too much external noise.

Extras: Tai Seng Trailers.

Conclusion: Well, as an experiment, Real Fiction is a decent effort. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it works as pure entertainment or a piece of thoughtful cinema. More of a curiosity worth visiting once, Real Fiction is best left as a rental for Kim Ki-duk fans.