La Vie en rose

Remarkably original and recklessly emotive, this debut feature by a former assistant to Im Kwon-Taek takes elements from gangster thrillers, melodramas, martial arts movies and film noir to colour an hallucinatory descent into Seoul's 'lower depths'. The setting is a rough part of town in the months just before the 1988 Olympics, a time when the military dictatorship slackened its grip in the hope of presenting a more liberal face to the visiting world. A young woman runs a basement flop-house, renting out comic books and screening soft-porn videos on the side; her life gets turned upside down by a taciturn macho man with enough trouble on his back to fill several flashbacks.