Author| Film Lady (Headline Signed Author)
After watching 1000+ movies, Madame really thinks:
Koreans are the most daring to shoot, and their guts are too fat.
Or rather, there's nothing they "can't" shoot.
For example, when it comes to topics related to modern history and politics, we are very strict in our control.
But for others, it is the "paradise" of creators, and good works are frequent.
For example, 3 years ago, Liu Yaren starred in "The Day of the Nation's Bankruptcy".
Just by listening to the name, you know that the thief is energetic!
The film is aimed at the Asian financial turmoil in 1997, telling the story of the conflict between the interests of all parties in the crisis in the first week before the bankruptcy of the country.
What Madame is going to talk about today is an old film from 22 years ago:
It is considered to be the leader of "driving Korea's century-old film industry to a new milestone"!
On the day of the release in South Korea, movie tickets were snapped up within 4 hours!
A total of 6.6 million spectators walked into the theater to crush the Titanic, which swept the world.
It grossed $35 million, a new record.
The film is called "Life and Death Butterfly Change" and is a milestone in the rise of Korean cinema.
Set against the backdrop of the division of North and South Korea, it tells the tragic past between female spies and male agents.
The film superimposes multiple elements of action, love, suspense, thriller, and crime.
In a word, not only dare to shoot, but also very good-looking!
<h1>One</h1>
The film is directed by Jiang Digui, which is his second work.
Let's first introduce the next 4 main actors.
The heroine, Kim Myung-hee (Kim Yoon-jin), is an agent of the Eighth Special Forces of North Korea.
Born in 1971, he is an ace sniper.
His main task was to assassinate South Korean government officials, and as a result, he was followed by the South Korean authorities for a long time.
Bu Wankun (Choi Min-sik) is his instructor and direct superior during the operation.
The male protagonist, Choi Sang-hwan (Han Seok-gyu), is a senior agent of South Korea's state-level secret intelligence agency.
He has a partner named Lee Jeong-hee (Song Kang-ho).
At the beginning of the film, the rapidly cut sharp shots show Kim Myung-hee's glorious achievements from training to going out on a mountain expedition, shaping her characteristics of "murderous maniac".
Since infiltrating South Korea in 1993, he has eliminated many politicians.
This attracted the attention of the authorities, but just as Choi Sang-hwan and his partner were investigating, she disappeared.
In the second year after the Asian financial crisis, it bubbled up again.
She asked black-market arms dealer Lin Guangchao to help find a new weapon called the Liquid Bomb CTX.
Lin bribed Kim Jong-shu, a researcher at the South Korean Ministry of National Defense, to steal it.
No, I didn't get it.
In order to eliminate the trouble and erase the traces, Kim Myung-hee killed two people.
It's so easy for her! Solve the problem directly.
But the Korean side represented by the male protagonist is therefore in trouble.
The very strange thing is that every time they act, the other party can always be one step ahead.
This, in turn, led to the failure of the plan.
After several battles, the two gradually reached a consensus: there must be an internal ghost to inform.
But apart from them, at most, the superior minister knows each other's whereabouts, assuming that there are ghosts inside, who will it be?
At the scene where the black market arms boss Lin Guangchao was killed, Choi Sang-hwan judged from the two bullets that it must be Kim Myung-hee, who disappeared a year ago.
The Korean side is still investigating and tracking along this line of thought, but it just doesn't know where Kim Myung-hee is?
On the other hand, in order to get CTX as soon as possible, North Korea sent a special agent organization led by Bu Wankun.
Since outsmarting (stealing) is not possible, let's fight!
Sure enough, the South Korean side was successfully intercepted by this group of people on the way to deliver CTX.
After that, they were full of confidence and planned how to sabotage the upcoming football friendly match between the two countries and achieve the "reunification of the motherland" in one fell swoop.
This time, Choi Sang-hwan slowed them down again.
Li Zhengxi keenly sensed that perhaps the most dangerous person was nearby.
So he installed a bugging device on Choi Sang-hwan's car.
Choi Sang-hwan has been hiding his agent identity from his girlfriend and secretly observing her.
He also lied to the high commissioner and his partner, trying to act alone to obtain certain information.
As the plot progresses, the truth finally comes out!
It turned out that Kim Myung-hee returned to South Korea after undergoing a facelift in Japan and used the passport and identity of Lin Meiyu, whom she met at the hospital.
Most crucially, she successfully lurked next to Choi Sang-hwan and became his lover.
The South Korean agents repeatedly failed in their operations, and it was all her troublemakers.
At this time, the football friendly match was held as scheduled, and the top leaders of the two countries attended.
North Korean agents attempted to assassinate the South Korean president, while South Korean agents went all out to prevent the liquid bomb CTX from exploding.
In the final battle, Kim Myung-hee, who once had a great battle, decided to die for love.
Bu Wankun, the top agent of the North Korean side, and Lee Jeong Hee of the South Korean side both died under the gun.
"Lone Hero" Choi Sang-hwan successfully prevented the explosion, and the whole film ended.
<h1>Two</h1>
The look and feel of "Life and Death Butterfly Change" will give people the illusion:
At first, I thought it was an action spy movie, but I found out that it was a suspense romance film, but I looked at it as a Wu Yusen-style gunfight movie, or Liu Weiqiang's "Infernal Affairs".
The variety of types of constantly intertwined visual sensations is dazzling and intense.
The action scenes of the film may be "dismissive" when watched now, but they were full of novelty at the time.
The bloody and shaking picture shows the fierceness of the dragon and tiger battle.
First layer by layer of emotions and lays down suspense, and finally reversed, the rhythm is smooth.
The first half of the love scene is romantic and beautiful, and the daily flirting cannot hide the strong love and honey.
The most eye-catching scene is their unsympathetic kiss in front of the aquarium in the torrential rain.
It is reminiscent of a scene in the telephone booth of Andy Lau and Maggie Cheung in "Carmen" in Mong Kok.
However, when each of them obeys the arrangement of his superiors and must complete the corresponding duties, the contradictions that cannot be hidden gradually gush out.
The tone of the film changes from warm and sweet to heavy and sad.
In the final final battle, the two men raised their guns to face each other.
At that time, the atmosphere was murderous and could not bear to shoot.
In the face of the country's righteousness, the male protagonist still shot.
The bullet went through the temple, and he killed his lover with his own hands.
But the trembling hands are clearly a symptom of the pain of the blood dripping inside.
The heroine immediately fell to the ground, her eyes full of affection, helplessness and reluctance, as well as the sense of happiness to obtain liberation, both complex and real.
The audience also immediately understood that every time the heroine performed a mission, her boyfriend was always within her sniper range, but why she never moved her heart.
As far as the heroine is concerned, love is supreme in her bones, and politics is just a "temporary" necessity.
Therefore, after the exposure of her side, she could not face her boyfriend, and only died.
The conflict between her political and love beliefs determined that she could only die.
The irreconcilable contradiction between personal love and national loyalty is catalyzed by a pain that is worse than death, and Kim Yoon-jin is very accurate.
Although the male protagonist loves her wholeheartedly and is extremely heartbroken after learning the true identity of his girlfriend, reason finally overcomes his feelings and has to kill her with his own hands.
At the end, he goes to Jeju Island to find the real Lim Mi-yu, trying to learn more about the life of his dead lover.
He also brought his lover's favorite kissing fish, he said:
If one of the two kissing fish dies, the other will also die of suicide with a lonely hunger strike.
Accompanied by the lover's favorite music in the headphones, the male protagonist's eyes are full of good memories.
The film places love in the context of the conflict of national interests, and infiltrates the korean nation in the division, and people's pain and tearing of the family and country.
Even though the two love each other and desire love to live and die together like kissing fish, they still can't get rid of the huge barrier of "political opposition".
This contradiction between love and reason, the inner competition is full of tension, making the tragic fate of the people who love each other cannot be together even more sad.
<h1>Three</h1>
It is worth pointing out that fish is a very important image in the film.
The appearance of the fish is a metaphor for the love of the male and female protagonists, and witnesses the process of the two people from love to life and death.
At the beginning, the fish is the red line of their love, and at the end, all the fish tanks are broken by gunshots, suggesting that their love is coming to an end.
The fish also has a practical function, and is the catalyst for the butterfly change in the relationship between the two people.
In the name of decorating her boyfriend's office, the heroine placed a lot of fish tanks and placed bugging devices in the belly of the fish, and the home was no exception.
As a result, she firmly controlled the whereabouts of the male protagonist and his team of agents in her own hands.
Audiences who love Tonkin films may notice that director Kim Ki-duk, who died not long ago, also likes to use fish that symbolize desire.
In a nutshell, the film is externally a life-and-death contest between three men.
(Madame's favorite is Choi Min-sik, a paranoid, gritty tough guy image)
Inside, however, is the love tragedy of Kim Myung-hee alone.
She was originally a top agent who killed people without blinking, but she fell in love with someone she shouldn't love, and the ending can be imagined.
However, her ability to love is really not to be underestimated.
He was able to direct and act out a scene where the two people met, and capture the male protagonist step by step, but the other party was completely unaware.
The richness and delicacy of his heart, tangled and tormented, is unimaginable.
When the chief officer, Bu Wankun, noticed that she had changed and flatly asked her to kill her lover, she broke down and wanted to swallow a gun and kill herself.
Deeply loved to this point, it is not difficult to understand why she died calmly in the end.
Only because he is "the only person in the world who understands her" and she is also the person he loves the most in the world.
Kim Myung-hee said in the parting phone recording:
With you, I am not Kim Myung-hee nor Lin Meiyu, but myself!
This feeling, real and touching, deep and heart-wrenching, but in the political context of war and hatred, they cannot go on.
It seems that it is difficult for female spies to get rid of the fate of dying for love.
In Ang Lee's "Color Ring", didn't Wang Jiazhi also die for love?
Although in today's terms, this film is a standard blockbuster mixed with Hong Kong-style gunfight films + Hollywood main themes, it is too "cheesy" or even "lackluster".
Nothing more than agents, terrorist attacks, gunfights, love, last-minute rescues, and the accumulation of standard elements such as righteousness.
But from the perspective of film history, "Life and Death Butterfly Change" is undoubtedly a milestone in the history of Korean cinema.
Under the on-screen hegemony of Hollywood, Korean audiences have seen the new brilliance of local films, which can be called the Korean version of "Wolf Warrior".
The emergence of this film also heralds the rise of Korean cinema.
After this, a number of word-of-mouth masterpieces emerged:
Old Boys, Memories of Killing, New World...
Looking around, Korean cinema is still moving forward in a high spirit.
(The picture originated from the Internet, invaded and deleted)
About the Author: @Movie Lady, independent film critic, headline number signed author. Write about film and television, but also write about the love and hate of the entertainment industry.