PARK CHAN-WOOK is best known for his vengeance trilogy, a series of violent dramas comprising Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Old Boy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.
So the opening of I'm a Cyborg, but that's OK, is a diversion for the South Korean director. Despite some gory moments, the film (which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival last month) is a tender romance about two young people gradually getting to know each other. The spin is that the two lovers are stark, raving mad.
'A lot of my previous characters have been in bad situations,' Park says with a grin. 'But these two are worse off than all the others. They live inside a mental institution and face all kinds of psychological hardships. But the way I portray them is much lighter than before. I've tried to depict them in a softer, funnier way. I wanted the tone of the film to be more insouciant than my previous works. That was the challenge I set myself.'
The result is a mildly engaging drama punctuated by some imaginative flights of fantasy. Lim Soo-jung, an ingenue who starred in gothic horror A Tale of Two Sisters, plays Young-goon, a girl who's convinced that she's a cyborg. She has violent fantasies in which she shoots bullets from her fingertips and has stopped eating because she says she runs on batteries. Il-soon (played by pop singer Jung Ji-hoon, aka Rain) is an introspective patient who worries about fading out of reality, falls in love with Young-goon and enters her world to save her from herself.
Park says that he consciously avoided One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-style depictions of institutional brutality. 'Unlike other films about mental asylums, my doctors are quite nice,' the 43-year-old director says. 'The young couple think differently, but are obviously insane, and the film takes the viewers inside their world. We see things through their eyes. Their world becomes our reality and we sympathise with their predicament.'
Young-goon has ended up in the asylum because she slashed her wrists and electrocuted herself ... to charge her batteries. 'Because she thinks she's a cyborg, she doesn't feel the need to eat,' says Park. 'Il-Soon tries to work out a way to solve her problem. It's not really a film about therapy - it's more about two people caring for each other and accepting each other for what they are.'
Lim seems to relish playing the eccentric cyborg. She has to repress her emotions and pretend to be an automaton.