301/302 - Disturbing!

What do you make of a "food" movie that does not make you feel like wanting to eat after the movie's done?

301/302 is one such movie. It was awarded South Korea's national prize for best film of 1995. And truly well deserved, if I could say so. This movie is so disquieting and disturbing, that hours after having seen the movie, the scenes are still afresh in my mind.

Viewing this movie comes for me at the right time around New Year's that I made a resolution to lose my weight. I am sure I have lost my appetite at least for a few days having watched this movie.

301 and 302 are two neighborhood apartments housing two lonely women with dark pasts. The movie opens with an investigator questioning the lady in 301 (an obssessive chef who thinks that food is the solution to all problems) about the lady resident in 302 (a lonely writer who has long lost the will and the longing to eat, make love and simply live), who seems to have disappeared. The investigation seems to be just a ploy to get the viewers interested in the story. Once the story lazily shifts gears between numerous flashbacks across numerous periods of times, you realize that the movie is not just a simple mystery/thriller. Rather it is a dark tragi-comedy, delving deep into the inter-relationship between food, love, sex and violence.

Through the course of the investigation and flashbacks, 301 is revealed to be compulsive about both food and sex. When she does not get sex and love, 301 resorts to more of cooking and feeding herself and people around her. And 302, who is revealed to be the daughter of a butcher, has some nasty skeletons in her closet explaining the reasons for her bulimia. When 301 learns of it, she begins cooking for her to attempt to shake her out of it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out as per 301's plans. All of 301's hard work in delicately preparing meals for her anorexic neighbor, goes in the trash and down the toilet, and the relationship between the two gets tenser and tenser.

As the movie was progressing, I was so badly hoping that the director does not chicken out like most other directors and resort to a lesbian angle to reduce the tension between the two lonely women. And this is where the director scores majorly from my side. Not only does the director not go down the beaten path, he resorts to a much more brutal, and logical end to this tale. Beware! This movie is not for the faint hearted.

The movie is filled with rather disgusting visuals of food preparation (I could almost see all my vegetarian friends cringing, I still cannot take my mind off the scene of the preparation of the loach soup). The close-ups of people gorging on various food items are bound to make anyone squeamish. The cinematography is great with an excellent use of vivid colors. Also, the inventive set design deserves praise, as most of the film takes place either in 302 (very sterile, library-like apartment) or 301 (very sleek and vibrant restaurant-like apartment with a futuristic looking kitchen). Using crisp cinematography and extreme close-ups, saturated colors, compelling set decoration, the overall production design is, in large measure, responsible for creating the movie's lingering sense of disturbance and disquiet.

Of course all this is brought together by the excellent direction, and I must really appreciate the director for his vision and guts in putting forward this brave movie. The editing, at first, I thought could have been a bit more taut, but on second thoughts, maybe it was the lazily paced narrative and extended cooking and eating scenes that made the movie all the more memorable. There are some unanswered questions till the very end (who was 302's mysterious male caller? Why did 301 cut her hair short in the very end to almost resemble a look similar to 302? And finally how did the investigation culminate?), but it would be nitpicky on my part to graze on these minor short comings in an otherwise interesting movie.

Ultimately the movie works because it's an odd relationship between the two women, where – if not predictably – these two women are destined to be together, one way or the other. Only 301 can fix 302's problems … with a solution that isn't exactly your or my definition of a gourmet meal.