‘Lies’: Truth May Be Tough to Take

Jang Sun Woo’s “Lies” is a no-holds-barred odyssey of sexual obsession, a work of honesty and artistic integrity that nonetheless will be difficult to watch for many viewers.

Although sexually explicit, to put it mildly, it is not pornographic in that it is not designed to arouse viewers but rather to explore sexual passion at its fullest--and darkest. Indeed, its tone is clinical rather than sensual as it traces ever-shifting power within a relationship between a man and a woman.

Adapted from a novel by Jang Jung Il, it unfolds as a recollection of the male protagonist, known only as J (Lee Sang Hyun). J is a wiry fortysomething Seoul sculptor clearly of some renown--as apparently Lee is in real life.

A pretty 18-year-old, Y (Kim Tae Yeon), whose best friend has been seeing J, is so turned on by the sound of his voice on the telephone that she decides that he’s the man to relieve her of her virginity. About to enter college as a statistics major, Y wants to have sex with a man for the first time on her own terms--because both her sisters lost their virginity through rape.

The attraction between J and Y is as instantaneous as it is overpowering. J conducts Y’s rite of passage confidently and so effectively that he is soon introducing flagellation as a prelude to sex. The mingling of pain and pleasure so intensifies their affair that it threatens to reel out of control, and as they trade the dominant role back and forth you begin to wonder who will finally go too far.

The filmmakers, however, ultimately are concerned with revealing that one of the partners is actually working through a liberation of self, leaving the other enslaved by an indelible love.

The hitch is that an awful lot of what J and Y are engaged in, in a seemingly endless number of hotel rooms, is not what lots of us would choose to watch, even if Jang Sun Woo’s stated intentions of breaking down distinctions between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and his overall anarchic spirit and its implications, do engage us intellectually.

The infliction of pain and the welts it raises on the bodies of J and Y might be a turn-on for them but a turnoff, to say the least, for lots of viewers--not to mention other kinky stuff they engage in. In short, you find your civil-libertarian self defending Jang Sun Woo’s right to exercise his freedom of expression to make and show his movie, while your own sensibilities are declaring that you are repulsed and wearied by much of what it depicts.

*

There’s no doubting Jang Sun Woo’s bold talent and vision, his bleak sense of irony and humor, or the sheer stamina required by one and all in the making of this stylish movie.

Doubtlessly a landmark in sexual candor in serious rather than merely exploitative cinema, “Lies,” whose title becomes clear only at its conclusion, tells certain undeniable truths with a metaphorical impact, but an awful lot of adults are surely already aware of them and their significance and won’t feel the need to see them spelled out.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: graphic depiction of sadomasochistic sex.

‘Lies’

Lee Sang Hyun: J

Kim Tae Yeon: Y

An Offline Releasing in association with Cowboy Booking International presentation of a Shincine Communications production in association with Korea Films. Writer-director Jang Sun Woo. Based on the novel “Tell Me a Lie” by Jang Jung Il. Producer Shin Chul. Executive producers Park Keon Seop, Kim Moo Ryung. Cinematographer Kim Woo Hyung. Editor Park Gok Ji. Music Dal Palan. Art director Kim Myeong Kyeong. In Korean, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

Exclusively at the Nuart through Thursday, 11272 W. Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.