Downfall (1997) User Reviews

A Haunting Film

[peter07 · 7/10 · 11 September 2006]

I saw this film in the theater in Seoul in 1997, and have never forgotten it. It's now out on DVD WITH English subtitles, and I'm sure it'll get quite a looksey from the foreign community.

A young woman is forced into prostitution after being tricked into thinking she'd work as a beverage seller. She's an orphan who has never known love in her life, and seeks a man who will love her unconditionally. She soon learns about the flesh trade, first as a novice hooker then as a veteran who hooks up with men who eventually dump her because of her past.

The movie is a journey into Korean prostitution from the 1970s to the 1990s, and the director does a good job by not making the movie overly sentimental. Prostitution still holds a major role in Korean society, with an estimated 20 percent of Korean women having held jobs in the "men's entertainment industry." The DVD is also apparently uncut, as it includes a pretty racy scene that was cut out in the videocassette release.

Feminists in Korea have a long row to hoe.

[taipan_88 · 8/10 · 26 October 2006]

Fate takes an orphan girl from the poverty of Korea in the seventies to a brief period of prosperity in the early nineties. Without a proper education, without a family and without honest friends Shin Eun-kyoung is treated like a servant and beaten like a dog.

Without a strong man to look after her, this hapless Korean woman is regarded as trash by mainstream Korean society and depressingly doomed to endlessly wander the city streets and country roads of Korea. Stopping here and there to earn a few crusts that are quickly snatched away by cruel men who consider themselves to be her overlords.

Just after this film was released Korea's economy entered a meltdown which has forced many women into a similar way of life that this film was foreshadowing as no longer necessary for young, educated Korean women.

In traditional Korea, it is women's duty to hold up the men to the sky. To succor them, to humor them, to provide them with the illusion that they are important.

A very sad tale of the relentlessness of fate for orphaned Korean women who fail to find a husband by the age of 25.

Mikio Naruse also might have made this!!

[luke-35 · 9/10 · 11 December 2005]

The life of woman is an eternal issue both in the feminism and the macho camps, but this movie is not dealing with it as an issue but as a discourse. Why a trajectory of one normal prostitute's life can powerfully demonstrate the social milieu of the Korean past; and to what extent her life can be paralleled to the normal life in the same context?

These two questions are cast throughout this movie and no answer is sought. Only the process of its exploration and contemplation is intended and the Great Director Kwon-taek I'm concurrently maintains the suitable distance from the actual events in order to render the depth of objectivity.

His cinematography hyperboling the huge mountain cliff alludes to the great obstacle for a woman who comes to live a tattered life, and this is also one of the most important elements on the Korean traditional painting. The Korean traditional aesthetics become symbolically transferred into the traditional restraint of Korean society for a woman who had no choice but to take the path of a prostitute, and this metaphor becomes a brilliantly shining explanatory tool in the movie without any detailed lines.

A masterpiece of the maestro who has now come in front of a mirror in order to reflect the rear side of the contemporary society of Korea. If Mikio Naruse is still alive, he will definitely cast a jealousy on this work.

I disagree, I believe that this movie is about....

[hyungsup2 · 8/10 · 23 May 2007]

I cannot believe your statistics where 20% of Korean women worked in the "entertainment business" which I believe that it's something to do with sex industry because of its inverted commas. I believe that this movie is about the life of prostitutes. Unlike normal woman prostitutes are reckoned dirty worldwide. I believe this movie tries to show the viewers if these prostitutes have any decency in herself. If see still has the beauty insider her to change her life. It's not really about the man overpowering the women. That's not the big point. The main point is on the prostitute not the man. You can see that the nice guy who rides the motorbike gets caught by the police 3 times possibly all by not wearing a helmet. Some things that can be easily done is actually really hard to do. In life people take the easiest road. Even though there is a road that is just a little bit more demanding but more rewarding, people usually take the most easiest way (the way that people are used to). It would be hard getting out from the prostitution but if she tried hard enough, would she have been able to get out of the dark world? She could easily have asked the guy with the motorbike to save her.