Cyber-punk adjacent, arthouse romance, pop-philosophical musing Niko debuts K-pop Girls' Generation member, Tiffany Young in the titular role as a woman who runs a business hiring herself out to comfort and talk to people who have locked themselves out of their apartment.
The city is in some sort ongoing, but very loosely enforced, government curfew. The locksmiths are busy helping get people off the streets.
Niko’s niche business is fine, but hardly booming, and she cannot continue to pay her bar tab or her rent. Even supplementing her income with a day job as a street vendor selling candy floss to passers by is not enough.
Niko’s niche business is fine, but hardly booming, and she cannot continue to pay her bar tab or her rent. Even supplementing her income with a day job as a street vendor selling candy floss to passers by is not enough.
In the moments between, she spends time drinking with her sad, but very hot and very French boyfriend, Jeremy, who is played by Sandor Funtek (Dheepan, Blue Is The Warmest Color, both Palm D'or winners) who appears here as a fusion of Brad Pitt and Benicio Del Toro. He is a photographer who limits himself to taking a single photograph per month (for the tension and the chances not taken). He has a lot of free time.
Jeremy also works during the day at a travel agency that only sells plane tickets between Korea and Kenya. This means, essentially business is zero, even before considering the ongoing government lockdown. Jeremy has hours and hours on his hands, and the ability to draw fur, so there will be heartache and a love triangle later.
At night, they are lovers. They smoke cigarettes against the hazy background of Seoul's city lights, and live in a kind of perpetual languorous melancholy (“It's the end of the world, so let’s talk about love.”) Niko fancies herself as the little green sprout in-between the cracks of sidewalk all around her crumbling neighbourhood. During the day, they live in separate mundanity; errands and work that is only barely work.
When Nico gets called to comfort a woman, Ji-eun, locked out of her place, she breaks her “code of conduct” of not fraternizing with the customers outside of official business, and becomes friends with her. They hang. They talk with people around town. She gets her fortune read by Jeremy’s only customer at the travel agency in weeks. Although, she does not know this.
Ji-eun gets a gig recording ADR for a comically impatient director, the movie of which happens to be a repeat of episodes from Niko’s life; or something like it. We see both Ji-eun and Niko recite the same lines. We know where the love triangle will occur.
Niko goes to a series of vaguely defined medical consultations, aomething about a procedure to turn the last remains of the cremated dead into a vinyl record mixed tape. The technician giving her these appointments smokes right in front of the rather large oxygen tank. This is dangerous, but he instead expresses a strong reluctance at her mysterious and unethical request, “I deplore your purpose, but I embrace your impatience.”
I understand the reasons why people might find Julien Levy’s pre-apocalyptic romance in the after hours of Seoul to be a wee bit bathetic, corny or even platitudinous, and a not so wee bit of wish-fulfilment for the director, who is a former Parisian photographer, currently living in Asia (Tokyo, not Seoul, so completely different, right?) There are tidbits of self-deprecation buried in the noise here, if you squint hard enough between the sop.
Regardless, or because of it, I loved every damn minute of this movie. I loved the amped up and ever-escalating pretentiousness, the imprecise meta-structure, the effortless crazy-sad-sexy unlikeliness of it all. And I loved the promiscuous, almost bratty, amorous “folle et fou.”
An unabashed amalgamation of Richard Linklater’s Slacker, Don McKeller’s Last Night, and the early cinema of Wong Kar Wai, with perhaps the tiniest soupçon of Christopher Boe’s Reconstruction, at one point, lying on her bed watching a film on a small CRT television, in my hope of hopes it was Before Sunset, the middle chapter where Hawke and Delpy would be about the same age as the characters are here.
An unabashed amalgamation of Richard Linklater’s Slacker, Don McKeller’s Last Night, and the early cinema of Wong Kar Wai, with perhaps the tiniest soupçon of Christopher Boe’s Reconstruction, at one point, lying on her bed watching a film on a small CRT television, in my hope of hopes it was Before Sunset, the middle chapter where Hawke and Delpy would be about the same age as the characters are here.
Amidst the sonorous lockdown sirens, the repeated needle drops, the ubiquitous smoking and the ever present ennui, I was sad, but I was happy. Before the film was even finished, I already missed the gauzy nights of soft light and hazy smoke and the banal days of dirty streets and busy people. I loved it. I wanted more.
Fuck the haters, queue the romantics. Niko wears its influences on its (eventually single) sleeve. It is, nevertheless, bonafide.