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Park Chan-wook's Insatiable Thirst

By Brian Hu

At Cannes this year, Park Chan-wooks Thirst won a Jury Prize and elicited a lot of confused anguish. It deserved both.

It's often said that what made Kurosawa's Shakespeare adaptations better than any of Hollywood's is that the change in culture and setting liberates the material from the need to create Shakespeare. Park Chan-wook's vampire drama Thirst benefits similarly. Sure, cinema has no shortage of vampire updates and transcultural transplantations (most recently, and effectively, is the cult hit Let the Right One In). But Thirst takes off as a beast of its own because it's allowed to forgo the mythical narrative with its many iconographic and gothic elements, and become, simply, an oddly-tempo'd, macabre Park Chan-wook gore-fest. For many critics, Park's sadistic, self-satisfying excess is the breaking point for Thirst. Note all of the Cannes critics who admired the film's aching first two-thirds, but protested the bloody final movement. 

I wouldn't go as far as to claim to hate the beginning and love the finale. Both have moments of pretention, interspersed with operatic brilliance. But I can't stop thinking about one scene in particular which kicks off the final act with such uncompromised ferocity that it had me hypnotized in wonder for the rest of the film. 

But first: the beginning. Thirst stars the always-fantastic Song Kang-ho as a priest so righteous he volunteers his body for a biological experiment with potentially disastrous consequences. Unfortunately, he leaves the experiment with some disconcerting side-effects. His face starts to bubble into blisters. His skin sizzles into smoke when left out in the sun. He develops super-human strength and can leap buildings. He discovers an obsession with sipping from a blood bag as a kid would a Capri Sun. It looks like he might have become a vampire. 

But that's more than vampire blood snaking through his biology. For the priest, those juices are the devil himself, torturing the priest with a thirst than can only be satiated with vice. The opening act toys with the idea that this man of the cloth must find a balance between his two lives as spiritual healer and sucker of blood. How far can he indulge in vice? How far can he be tempted? 

The latter question is answered by the introduction of the oddly beautiful Tae-ju, whose bursts of manic energy have a strangeness only topped by her dim-witted husband and his creepy, protective mother. The child-like Tae-ju is all eyes -- though that soon becomes all legs, and all breasts, and all silky-white skin under which boils blood craving erotic gratification and blood craved by a vampire priest whose thirst is by now irreversibly sexual. 

Like the classic vampire movies, blood-sucking is an act of sexual ecstasy.  But unlike most vampires, the priest in Thirst is not sexy; Song Kang-ho is no Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire. Rather, the sexual energy in Thirst is fabulously tactile and sonic. It comes not from the desire Song elicits, but from the pressing of mouth to finger, to hand, to neck, to chest, to thigh. It's the cunnilingual slurps that summon the rapture. And since the righteous priest is not one to take blood by force, the blood-sucking usually involves some form of flirtation and reciprocity. The vampire doesn't simply need to suck his victim's libidinous fluids. The throbbing victim must crave the opportunity to offer his or her juices. And so the priest must win their desire. 

Park Chan-wook and production designer Ryu Seong-hie envelop these bedroom yearnings in gaudy wallpaper evoking rotting vegetation. Dark reds and greens swirl moods of death and desperation. Their dank furniture look like fake antiques in hell's living room. As a team, Park and Ryu have created similar insular dream-chambers in the past: the mysterious hotel room in Oldboy, the living room set in Cut. With Thirst, their demented visions coalesce with the cold, even sickly, libidinous energies, creating what I think is their most emotionally effective collaboration to date. 

This is the setting for that brilliant scene I can't get out of my head. As the film enters its final, triumphant act, the film readies for yet another tone shift. Tae-ju and the priest engage in an extended back-and-forth of abuse and desire, their ravishment becoming so extreme the camera almost doesn’t know what to do anymore. A silent, immobile witness looks on. The priest perhaps goes too far. Then in a moment of simultaneous redemption and ultimate sin, he goes even further, whacking even dizzier the dementia of good and evil, permission and force, life and death, pain and ecstasy, blood and saliva, until such boundaries become unmanageable. Thematically, cinematically, and sexually, this is Thirst's undeniable climax. 

Yes, this is Park at his soapiest and most excessive. And yes, this triggers the often ridiculous final chapters. But when Park’s id gets out of hand, it's when he's most in control of our emotions. Sure, sometimes that control is like a hand locked around our necks, shaking the reason out of our heads. But Park’s almost comical frenzy is also the most cinematic of seizures, and I much prefer this to the calculated stylistic flourishes which drag down the first half of Thirst and the entirety of his previous film I'm a Cyborg, but That’s OK. 

Which isn't to say that Park is only good when he’s sloppy. The final act of Thirst is as stylistically decadent as anything that came before. But here, the effect is derangement, not static pretention. I’m thinking of the look on Tae-ju's face toward the end of the film: an unhinged smile teetering manically between violence and virility and vacuity. And it's more dangerously beautiful than ever. 

Date Posted: 7/17/2009