I idly wondered if the title of No Regret, a heavy-duty Korean gay melodrama shown at last year’s Frameline festival and now returning, was a reference to the signature song of Edith Piaf, but the lovers in the film share little - until just maybe at the very end — of the hands-on-the-hips, spit-in-your-eye defiance of the great chantootsie.
What it does have, finally, is the supercharged emotionalism of Korean films of the past decade. I’m not talking your ordinary, overheated soap-opera emotion, although there is plenty of that. I’m talking about headlong, off-the-rails plunge into the extreme. Yeah!
In this rich man, poor man story, the wealthy one is inextricably tied to a social order that is very clear about what it expects. Marriage, children, responsibility to one’s class and family. If gay sex is thrown into the mix, the most that might be tolerated is a closeted double life, so long as maintaining the family facade comes first. Gay freedom? Are you nuts? The subject never comes up.
At least not in the confines of this film. The circumstances of the other lover, and main character, is almost Dickensian, not only poor, but the product of an orphanage, aged out at 18 and thus with no social standing. The fact that he’s a rent boy, however reluctantly, could hardly make it worse. There might be some way to accommodate a two-bit sexual transaction but nothing more. True passion? It can only lead to disaster, and so it does in No Regret.
The film, which opens Friday, Aug. 29, at the Lumiere in San Francisco, may be a low-budget indie, but the performances and craftsmanship lift it up several notches. The writer-director, Leesong Hee-il, shows admirable confidence in the face of his sometimes unruly material. He has said that by making one of the characters a “host’’ in a male-only club he wanted to do a gay version of a familiar type of Korean film, the hostess drama, where a girl from the sticks goes to the big city, slips into prostitution and is badly used by the men she encounters. For another twist this time around, feel free to think of Marlene Dietrich’s Blue Angel, where the lovelorn, pathetic john is hopelessly caught up.
Su-min (Lee Young-hoon) swims into the frame and into the film in bare-assed country bliss, which doesn’t last long. Once relocated in the city, he loses a factory job and soon gives up on a string of demeaning jobs before becoming a rent boy at a Seoul club for men (called “X-Large’’). It seems to be a combination karaoke club cum bathhouse. Hmmm. Some of the other hosts claim to have girl friends on the side and certainly their clients behave like macho straight men slumming. All this Korean testosterone doesn’t keep the bad-mouthing male madame from calling his boys “bitches.’’ In the naked karaoke scenes (love that, “naked karaoke’’) Leesong uncannily manages to shoot right down to the pubic hair line and no farther. There is nothing campy about these scenes; grim determination is more like it.
The tough, simpatico Su-min claims he is only in it for the money. His success can be seen in his improving wardrobe. One of his jobs had been driving men home from the bars after a night of drinking, and one of them turned out to be Jae-min (Lee Han), the son of a corporate CEO. He makes a pass at Su-min, is rejected but keeps materializing wherever the young man works, both at a factory his company just happens to run and at the club — stalker alert. Su-min also has a buddy at the factory who, in a quick, slickly executed moment bows to the boss and then curses him under his breath as he turns away. Keep an eye on this guy..
There is a pair of parallel sex scenes as Su-min and Jae-min exchange roles, sexually and emotionally. Su-min’s expression of disgust in the first turns into playful whispers in the second. The desperate Jae-min can get overwrought - do you think? (“I wish your cock was a gun. I wish I could pull the trigger inside me"), and he has a tendency toward self-mutilation. There will be blood, death threats and missed connections. The film is long, almost two hours, the color often monochromatic and the tone approaches morose, but when suppressed rage finally erupts, a viewer can hardly believe his eyes.
