Natali

Joo Kyung Joong

The story: At an exhibition by sculptor Hwang Joon Hyuk (Lee Sung Jae), art critic Jang Min Woo (Kim Ji Hoon) turns up and insists on buying the piece titled Natali. The nude sculpture is modelled after the enigmatic Oh Mi Ran (Park Hyun Jin), who is Hwang’s former student and Jang’s former classmate.

Let’s just get straight to the sex scenes. After all, it is the first erotic film in 3-D to open in Singapore since Avatar (2009) made the technology popular and it does open with a series of love-making sequences between sculptor Hwang and his muse Oh.

The coital displays are carefully art-directed. There is the use of soft-focus lighting, sensuous background music and strategic draping of bedsheets.

Unlike the more explicit Lust, Caution (2007), where the sexual power play is integral to the story, here it is pretty much sex for the sake of sex. Conveniently, Hwang is a horny artistic type who also gets it on with the curator of the exhibition.

One could say that it was to the credit of writer-director Joo Kyung Joong that the use of 3-D was restrained and there were no body parts protruding out of the screen.

On the other hand, it also meant that the 3-D effects were not adding to the eye-popping quotient of the carnal episodes. In fact, it was often easy to forget that one was watching a 3-D film.

If anything was being thrust in our faces, it was the sometimes ungrammatical Mandarin and English subtitles. Mind you, this is not a post-conversion 3-D movie, where a producer decides to cash in on the craze after a film has already been shot in conventional 2-D, in the case of the fantasy adventure Clash Of The Titans (2010). Here, the decision to cash in was made right from the start.

Plot-wise, there is supposed to be some tension generated by the fact that the sculptor and the art critic have slightly differing versions of what happened between Hwang and Oh.

But since none of the characters is particularly interesting, the film ends up being a slow-moving talkfest. The critic makes some melodramatic revelations towards the end but the effect is more laughable than moving.

There is an unintentionally funny flashback scene, where Jang is shown scrubbing clothes on a washboard by the stream as he gazes loving at Oh. Have these people not heard of a washing machine?

Or maybe the film’s producers ran out of budget after using it up for the muted 3-D technology.

(ST)