Fantastic Parasuicides

Hanging Tough directed by Park Soo-young

Fly Away, Chicken! directed Cho Chang-ho

Happy Birthday directed by Kim Song-ho

Review by Roberto Azula

Combining the worst elements of avant-garde and masochistic Korean cinema, Fantastic Parasuicides is an incoherent mess. The film is divided into three separate chapters directed by three directors. The first chapter, Park Soo-Young’s Hanging Tough, opens with a schoolgirl who, distraught that she missed an exam, commits suicide. But no, she’s alive. Now she’s dead. No wait, she’s alive. After the fifth time she wakes up into a different, disorienting situation, all I could think was “Would you just die already?” She is pursued, hounded, and harangued by a lesbian school nurse, a classmate with a laser gun, and a teacher who apparently had been beating up students. Then the schoolgirl gets to do some haranguing of her own, in that reedy, sanctimonious tone of voice that Ellen Page inflicted upon the world in Hard Candy and Juno. Every time someone starts a car, you get to see a cheap CGI rendition of an internal combustion engine starting up. Oh, how clever. That particular graphic had already been done in The Fast and The Furious, and at least that film had the excuse that it was about cars.

The next chapter, Cho Chang-ho’s Fly Away, Chicken!, is more of the same: people walking around doing nonsensical things for the sake of “metaphor”. The opening scene is a gun battle that goes on ad infinitum, and then the main character, presumably a cop, goes to a beach and encounters three retarded men on scooters. He thinks a lot about himself in a bathtub. All the scenes in Hanging Tough and Fly Away, Chicken! look cobbled together, as if the directors yelled at their actors, “Do something quirky! Say something weird!”

Kim Song-ho’s Happy Birthday, the most coherent of the trio, is entertaining in a slight way mainly because it has a cohesive narrative rather than some lame attempt at Theater of the Absurd. But my mood was so foul by the time the film trudged into this last chapter that it was all I could do to not hit the eject button. Maybe Fantastic Parasuicides should have opened with Happy Birthday. And then deleted the next two selections.