In the previous chapter, I showed how three well-known films by Park Chan-wook, JSA, SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE, AND OLDBOY, operate through an ethics of moral credit and debt. Born from ressentiment and given narrative form through melodrama, this ethics determines the logic of vengeance and retribution in all three films. I also demonstrated how this logic works allegorically to reflect desires produced by and reinforced through profound socio-political shifts that occurred in post-IMF South Korean life: new strategies of reconciliation between the two Koreas, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the changing relationship between capital and labor wrought by the demands imposed by the IMF. Park's films may be read as limit cases that trace the trajectory of sovereign violence until it is stymied and rendered inoperable. Characters with which the spectator are supposed to sympathize become, by the films’ conclusions, intoxicated with cruelty. In this transformation, Park's films overturn the ethics and melodrama of vengeance in JSA, SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE, and OLDBOY from within.

In the following sections, I would like to take into consideration three films by two Korean directors, also familiar to the international film festival circuit. Hong Sang-soo's VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (2000), his WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN (2004), and Park Ki-yong's CAMEL(s) (2002) play out the sexual politics that mediate relations between men and women in post-IMF Korea. All three films feature seemingly alienated characters, long takes, and a minimalistic, severe cinematic style. In this chapter, we shall see how the cycles of male desire represented in these films may be read in conjunction with notions of capitalist temporality that remain closed to the possibility of chance and contingency. Narcissistic and inflexible, the egos represented in these anti-melodramatic films are subsequently unable to affirm the heterogeneity of the other in the manner called for in chapter one by Levinas. However, despite their repetitious pattern of reducing difference to the finite logic of the same, we shall see how a critique of desire may be produced precisely through repetition and through the reproducibility of the film medium itself.