Life is a Soap Opera

A cyclops, a cross-dressing business man, a yodelling transfer student from Switzerland and a school principal who turns into a dragon are just some of the extravagant characters in the teenage comedy/musical DASEPO NAUGHTY GIRLS (DASEPO SONYEO, South Korea) directed by E J-Yong.

The film is set in a place called “The No Use High School”, a strange surreal caricature of a school with all its drama and gossip blown up to absurd proportions. One lecturer who teaches the “atheist class” demands to be punished by his students for not imparting to them sufficient knowledge about the cultural heritage of Korea but actually simply enjoys the sado-masochistic aspect of it. There are the typical outcasts of course, one being a poor girl who has to prostitute herself to earn money for her family, another one a pretty “girl” who is in reality a pretty boy.

DASEPO NAUGHTY GIRLS is a highly artificial, stylised “Pop-film” told in captivating images by cinematographer Chung Jung-hoon who is a frequent collaborator of Park Chan-wook (I AM A CYBORG, BUT THAT’S OK).

Adapted from a manga-comic with the same title, which was published on the internet, the film manages to maintain the episodic way of story-telling of the original and breaks with the classical form of narration. The director, whose earlier films are formally very rigid, describes the shooting of the film as a liberating experience, the kind of fun thing he wanted to do since he was in his twenties.

E’s weird, colourful tale – his last film UNTOLD SCANDAL was based on the novel “Dangerous Liaisons” – sucks you into a vibrating, sparkling world. People suddenly start singing out of the blue, and being poor is represented in the shape of a small woollen creature called “Poverty” which clings on to people’s backs like a child.

The film breaks with social taboos, some of them representative for Korean society, others concerning all of us.

At several moments, the troubled teenagers exclaim in amazement: “Life is a soap opera!” and so indeed is this fanciful film. Not only that, it is also a karaoke show. Every time the characters start singing the karaoke sing-along display appears on the screen and the invites the audience to join in, which according to the director they happily do in Korea.
Many of the actors come from a different background than acting; one is the singer in a boy-group, while others are models. This goes well with the overall trashy approach of the teen comedy-parody. A journalist at the Berlinale press conference even compared it to THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW.

The story may be very tacky at times, it may be driven by a weird sense of humour but watching the film is a very entertaining and innovative experience once you have let yourself be carried away. With this latest film E J-Yong might just have created something of a new genre: the “Korean Karaoke-Bollywoodfilm”.

Sarah Stähli

© Berlinale Talent Campus 2007