Somewhere between hardcore and softcore pornography lies … well, Lies, a bold, button-pushing film from Jang Sun Woo, the reigning bad boy of Korean cinema.  His latest is about the sadomasochistic relationship between a high school virgin and her older lover.  The film is based on Jung-Il Chang’s novel (adapted by Jang), which has been banned in Korea.

Lies would have been creepy enough left to its own devices, but Jang uses a bunch of interesting cinematic techniques to make the film look and feel like a documentary about defiling a naïve girl.  Both principal actors are making their screen debuts, and their characters are only known by their first initials.  Lies contains documentary-style interviews with both actors, and each provides narration throughout portions of the film.

Tae Yeon Kim plays Y, an 18-year-old high school virgin who wants to get laid before her graduation.  Through her best friend Woori (Hye Jin Jeon), she is introduced to a 38-year-old artist named J (Sang Hyun Lee).  Woori is in love with J and his art, but she’s too embarrassed to make advances toward the married sculptor.  Instead, Woori makes her friend call J, and she finds herself living vicariously through the colorful acts of phone sex that Y has with J.

Y and J eventually agree to meet in person, and the two perform every carnal act imaginable.  Lies pulls no punches here, showing it all as Y is violated in every orifice.  Jang even uses some clever title cards to announce which cavity J is about to fill (“The First Hole,” “The Second Hole,” and so forth).

The dialogue isn’t any less crass than the visuals.  J rudely announces,  “I’m going in,” before invading one of Y’s nooks.  When he’s trying to get her backside to loosen up, he advises her to “think of my dick as shit – that’ll make it easier.”  He also paws at her private parts like a monkey looking for bugs.

Strangely, Y seems game for everything, cooing, “I like anything that J does” to the enraptured Woori.  When J introduces beatings to their sexual routine, she still doesn’t freak out, claiming, “My ass is killing me, but this is great!”  The whippings increase in severity, and it isn’t long before Y’s brother (Kwon Taek Han) begins to get suspicious about her sister’s violent older lover.

Lies is disturbing cinema at either its best or worst form, depending on where you stand on the issue of perversity in modern cinema.  It’s great that Jang was able to produce such an unflinching look at the bizarre sexual relationship between two obviously unstable people, but other than raising both eyebrows and trousers, I’m not too sure what his point was.

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but contains nudity, strong sexual content, violence and adult language