MOVIE REVIEW : ‘301-302’: Dark, Witty, Delicious

Chul-Soo Park’s outrageous but insightful “301-302” takes its curious title from the numbers of adjoining apartments in a luxe Seoul high-rise. Since the woman in 301 (Eun-Jin Bang) is a gourmet chef who loves her own cooking and her next-door neighbor in 302 (Sin-Hye Hwang) is anorexic and bulimic, this pitch-dark comedy promises to be decidedly different.

Both are young, attractive women who look perfectly normal. Gradually, in flashback, we learn of the forces that shaped them and their odd friendship, which begins with 301 trying to force-feed 302 until she learns to know better. Both actresses are highly capable and sustain these women through the increasingly bizarre twists of their intertwined destinies.

Until it acquires a tone of inevitability “301-302” is so unpredictable that it would spoil the show to give too much away. At the heart of the film, which was Korea’s official Oscar entry, is a psychological suspense mystery that explores, in the very opposite contexts of these women’s lives, the relationship between food and sex. Park and screenwriter Suk-Goon Lee suggest that sexual trauma or frustration leads to eating disorders and finally to obsessive behavior. There’s obviously nothing all that original in such a suggestion, but there is in the way Park tells the story visually, relating the women’s outward behavior with their inner lives and drives with high style and impact.

With an awesomely well-equipped kitchen at her command, 301 is constantly preparing food, but her actions--most often photographed in claustrophobic close-up--are so repetitive, the parade of luscious-looking dishes so unending, that Park is able to evoke attraction-repulsion reactions in the viewer that suggests the depths of desperation in both women. Park finds that level at which individuals consumed with the love of food and those consumed with a hatred of it are very much the same, imprisoned by inexorable, implacable needs.

You can read all of this--and doubtlessly more--into “301-302” should you care to, for Park is too subtle, too witty a storyteller to spell out any larger meanings, leaving us to make what we will of the women’s fate and what that says of the world in which we live.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film includes sex, nudity, violence and much bizarre adult behavior.

‘301-302’

Eun-Jin Bang: 301 (Song-Hee Kang)

Sin-Hye Hwang: 302 (Yoon-Hee Kim)

Chu-Ryun Kim: Detective (Mr. Choi)

Chul-Ho Park: 301’s ex-husband (Joon Shik Kang)

An Arrow Release New Line presentation. Producer-director Chul-Soo Park. Screenplay by Suk-Goon Lee. Cinematographer Eun-Gil Lee. Editor Gol-Ji Park. Sound designer Dae-Sung Kang. Art director Jung-Who Choi. Set designer Yung-Sam Cho. In Korean, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

* Exclusively for one week at the Grande Theater, 345 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, (213) 617-0268.