GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 7/18/05)

Given its Big-Theme title, occasional symbolic imagery, and lachrymose score, one can infer that prolific Korean director Kim Ki-Duk's latest film is meant as a profound statement. About, you know, time, and how it shapes and sometimes warps our emotions and hence, our selves. Alas, the picture doesn't even begin to approach its lofty goal — but as a whacked-out psychodrama of amour fou with a Twilight Zone–ish stinger in its tail, Time is more than reasonably diverting.

After a brief sequence of really disgusting plastic-surgery footage, the picture opens with a bang as Seh-Hee (Park Ji-yun, Tokyo Warriors) walks into a coffee shop to find boyfriend Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo) admiring the form of a young waitress. She starts right in on the rather hapless fellow, and then melts down completely after he is overly polite (by her lights) to the two girls who accidentally rear-end his parked car. Later, in bed, she frets over her jealousy and her anxiety that Ji-woo will become bored with her (although this woman is obviously anything but boring), then essentially baits him into making love to her while thinking of the waitress. And the next day, she disappears.

Ji-woo, who's a decent albeit probably slightly simple chap, is bereft. Unbeknownst to him, Seh-Hee's trauma has led her to a plastic surgeon. In a bizarre scheme to reclaim the love she believes she's lost, she's putting herself under the knife. A new face, a new identity, and a new name — one very similar to her old one.

In the meantime, Ji-woo's desultory attempts to find new love, or at least diversion, keep getting interrupted. A rock through a motel window busts up an assignation with a karaoke bar hostess. (Korean karaoke bars sure look like fun, I'll tell ya.) An old not-quite-flame's come-on turns into a brush off after she has a mysterious ladies-room confrontation.

And then enters See-Heh (Seong Hyeon-ah, as terrific here as she was in Hong Sang-soo's wonderful Woman Is the Future of Man), who insinuates herself into Ji-woo's life, helps him love again, and freaks out when he reveals his ambivalence over the love he lost. (Most of these confrontations take place in the same coffeehouse — one from which you might figure the character would have been banned about halfway through the picture. Time revels in its implausibilities to the point that one doesn't much mind them.) Driven to more than distraction, Ji-woo makes a dire decision.

"What do women want?" Freud once asked, and,more than once during this film, the viewer will wonder just what in hell will satisfy Time's woman. Kim's work sometimes exhibits a misogynist streak, but both Park and Seong's performances as the same woman suggest a frustration that's metaphysical rather than gender-based. Their work is about as genuinely heavy as Time gets.

— Glenn Kenny