THIRST: CECI EST MON SANG

Korea, 2009, 133 minutes, Colour.
Song Kang- Ho, Kim Ok- Vin.
Directed by Park Chan- Wook.

Whew! (and that's an understatement). Another word that springs to mind is 'Bonkers'! And then one reads in the final credits that Thirst has been inspired by Emile Zola's Therese Raquin. Not that one would immediately notice.

Park Chan- Wook's reputation, and a strong one it is, does not depend on reticence or ordinariness. Old Boy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance..., not exactly restrained. He goes for the full, hard-hitting melodrama.

Thirst is full of themes that will have analysts buzzing for a long time. One of the difficulties of making a film which glories in genres, conventions (and breaking them) and the absurd is that if you spend a quarter of the film in a very, very serious tone, pondering on illness, mortality, the role of the Catholic priest, self-discipline and self-sacrifice even to medical martyrdom, the transition to (or descent into) what Park Chan- Wook labels as vampire melodrama, you can just go whoosh or you can lead your audience where you want them to go. Thirst opts more for the whoosh.

Spoiling plot development a little, we can say that the priest dies a saint, and people want healings from him. But an unknown injection of blood turns him into a vampire. To be fair, he knows that he has been transformed even damned, and while he does not want to kill anyone, his vow of celibacy becomes more than a stumbling block.

Before he died, the priest was a sympathetic pastor. On his return a mother wants him to cure her son of cancer. The son is an old acquaintance, as his wife, who was also an orphan like the priest.

To avoid describing how the priest and the wife become unnatural born killers, suffice it to say that there is a lot of blood lust and the ordinary lust. Which gives the director the opportunity, not to offer us refelections on faith, commitment, sin and free will, but to explore these themes through the melodrama and the tantalising symbol of a priest unwittingly and unwillingly turned devil-figure and his moral struggles, all in the context of contemporary Korean society with its traditional religions, unbelief and the presence of Christian minorities.

The film goes on for thirty minutes or more after it has virtually ended, the director playing with horror and vampiric images, ready for a laugh as well as a gasp, the film becoming (intentionally) sillier. Finally, the sun comes up, the priest and the wife have no cover....

1.Expectations from the work of the director? Fulfilled – beyond?

2.The director and his tradition of Korean horror, melodrama? The visceral response, the emotional response? Reflection on themes?

3.The film based on the novel by Zola, Therese Raquin? Love, illicit love? His transferring the vampire film traditions? Into Korean horror?

4.The Korean city, the hospital, the streets and apartments, the shop? The monastery? The contrast with the countryside, the coast and the cliffs? The underlying realism? The sequences in Africa, the centre, the grounds?

5.The plot and treatment as absurd? The first part serious, transferring to the vampire genre, going beyond? The effect?

6.The serious establishing of the plot: the priest, a good man, patient, prayer, hospital chaplain? In the monastery, his obedience to the blind friar? Hearing the nurse’s confession, comments on suicide and depression? Her response about the physical penance and his keeping to prayer? His quest, the experience of people dying in the hospital, the discussions about martyrdom, the role of the Devil making martyrs?

7.Going to Africa, the friar not wanting him to go? His explanation of his motivation to the doctor, to the video? The centre not wanting martyrs nor suicide candidates? The regimen in the centre, playing volleyball, the room, playing the flute? Peace? His playing the flute and the blood coming? His death?

8.The serious presentation of the themes and characters to this point?

9.The priest reviving, six months later, the mystery of what happened to him, the bandage, going back to the monastery, discussions with the friar, the people approaching him, wanting miracles, the mother demanding the cure for her son’s cancer?

10.The new story, the priest, his transfusion, devout, the young man with the cancer, the discovery that he was healed? Knowing the family in the past, the young man’s wife, the orphanage? Their being friends and playing?

11.His growing need for blood, the patient in the hospital in coma, the comic touches of his search? The way that he drank the blood? The effect on him as a person, his vocation, not wanting to kill people, the temptations to lust, his beating himself in his cell? With the wife, their encounters, interrupted by the mother? The celibacy crisis?

12.His decision, being one of the undead, experiencing Hell, bloodlust, physical lust? His discussions with the friar, the friar’s desire for blood in order that he might see the sunrise? His decision to leave the monastery? The newfound freedom?

13.His dealings with the family, their characters, the possessive mother, dominating, her drinking? Her son, foolish? The shop, the mother’s domination of her daughter-in-law?

14.The group going fishing, the official and his permit? The wife and her despising of her husband? The plan to kill him? In the water, drowning, being rescued? The fishing line in the wife’s ear? The priest hiding the body, the stone over him? The reappearance of the man in the dreams?

15.The wife and the priest, painting the apartment white, staying in at daytime? Love and passion? Going to the hospital for blood? Her going to the highway, causing car crashes, the blood from the victims, burying the dead?

16.The clash between the two, their principles, the wife taunting the priest, yet the mad love?

17.The mother, the stroke, in the chair, her friends coming to gamble, the difficulties about the fishing and the dead bodies? The Filipino wife? The games, the mother and her tapping, blinking, communicating, indication of the murder?

18.The priest and the wife and the treatment of the mother – in the horror film style?

19.The fight between the two, whether to kill or not? The wife changing, the priest not? The blood and the healing of the disease? The mysterious healings? The wife and her slashes, healed? Going to the hospital? The exposure to the friends, the wife going into frenzy, killing the guests? The priest and the Filipino woman – killing her or not?

20.The priest’s decision, the car, going to the cliff, the mother in the back with the music? The wife trying to hide in the boot of the car, his throwing away the cover? Hiding under the car? Finally sitting on the car, the sun rising, the views, their deaths?

21.How well did the serious, the vampire genre, the comic and the absurd combine?