Samaritan Girl (2004)

Although it may seem fairly one-note on paper, the revenge film can be quite the versatile medium given the various angles the idea of revenge can be viewed from. Clearly the most well know and popular style of vengeance based films is the rape/revenge film, wherein sexual assault survivors enact righteous justice on their attackers, a formula perfected in films like Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981) and Takashi Ishii’s Freeze Me (2000). An interesting twist on standard rape/revenge trajectory can be found in Ingmar Berman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) and the film it subsequently inspired, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), which finds the parents of the victims seeking the vengeance. There’s also of course the vigilante justice revenge genre with the Death Wish series being the most famous example. Personal vendettas are yet another common prototype used to springboard a revenge film as seen in films like the exploitation classic Johnny Firecloud (1975) and Larry Clark’s blistering true crime saga Bully (2001). South Korean maverick Kim Ki-duk first tried his hand at the revenge film with the one-take experiment Real Fiction (2000), a highly original, self-reflexive film-within-a-film following a street artist getting even with all those who’ve wronged him. Four years later, Kim would again tackle the subject of revenge and so much more with Samaritan Girl, a deeply affecting film featuring Kim’s typically challenging approach to difficult subject matter.

In an attempt to afford two plane tickets to Europe, Jae-yeong and Yeo-jin, two high school students have turned to prostitution with Jae-yeong actually meeting the clients while Yeo-jin arranges the appointments and keeps the books. During a police raid, Jae-yeong jumps from a window as a means of escape and later dies from her injuries. As a tribute to her late friend, Yeo-jin begins seeing all the clients in her record book herself, sleeping with them then refunding their money. During one of her appointments however, Yeo-jin’s father Yeong-ki, a policeman, spots her with a client and soon begins following her clients, embarking on a camping of escalating violence.

Although billed as “a dark tale of revenge” on the DVD cover, it must be said that, while the film is indeed a dark tale and revenge does eventually play a major part in it, Samaritan Girl (Samaria, 사마리아) is still so much more and anyone going into it expecting something along the lines of I Spit on Your Grave (1978) are bound to be disappointed. Split up into three chapters, Kim covers a lot of ground with Samaritan Girl. The first chapter, “Vasumitra”, not only establishes the relationship between Jae-yeong and Yeo-jin but also introduces the various religious allegories that will hover over the rest of the film, namely Yeo-jin’s very Catholic mentality in regards to shame as it relates to her and Jae-yeong’s business practices. The films religious overtones are even more explicit in the films second act, “Samaria”, but also become a bit more obscured with Yeo-jin prostituting herself but returning the clients money as some sort of bizarre penance for her dead friend and as a way to feel less guilty. This second act also sets up the actions of Yeo-jin’s father and its during the films final third, “Sonata” where Kim lets Yeo-jin's fathers rage boil over into murder. What’s equally important, and for that matter emotionally cathartic, about the last act is the time spent alone with Yeo-jin and her father, in effect turning the film into a coming of age story of sorts, resulting in some of the most poignant moments in all of Kim’s filmography.

Like many of Kim’s other films, Samaritan Girl sees Kim shining a light on a darker aspect of South Korean society, a tactic which has made him a pariah in his home country. His main target in Samaritan Girl of course being teenage prostitution and naturally he was criticized for his portrayal and amazingly some critics even accused Kim of glamorizing underage sex work which is utterly asinine to anyone with a working brain, with Kim mentioning the issue in several interviews promoting the film. A 2012 study claimed that half of the 60% of teenage runaways in South Korea have turned to prostitution, citing academic and home pressures as their reasoning for turning to the streets. Its interesting to compare and contrast Samaritan Girl to Kim’s earlier Bad Guy (2001), which used the world of prostitution as its backdrop as unlike in Bad Guy, who’s main female character was forced into sex work whereas in Samaritan Girl Jae-yeong and Yeo-jin are acting of their own free will and although prostitution is used as the catalyst, Kim again has other things on his mind as well. Although it doesn’t seem to be as regarded as 3-Iron (2004), the other film Kim released the same year, Samaritan Girl is an essential Kim film and one that might be difficult to decipher but nevertheless gives another good example of Kim’s take on the human condition.