Ashamed

Ashamed has ambitions of being artsy and profound. Unfortunately, such ambitions were lost on me. I spent most of the movie just trying to keep straight what was happening. This movie has three characters with the same first name. The summary that follows is going to be a lot more approximate and potentially incorrect than usual.

The framing of the film is about an art professor named Jung Ji-Woo and her student, Hee-Jin. Jung is working on an art project about a dead pregnant bride. Hee-Jin offers up the services of her friend Yoon Ji-woo, for this art project. The three go to a beach and Yoon is asked what it’s like to love a woman. Yoon then delves into a flashback about her strained relationship with another woman named Kang Ji-Woo

The meeting of Kang and Yoon is patently ridiculous. Yoon throws a mannequin off a rooftop because she wants to know what it would be like but obviously, doesn’t want to die. This mannequin hits a car that was carrying Kang and the people who I believe were kidnapping her. I am also not certain I got their names the right way around. Yoon may have been the kidnap victim and Kang the mannequin thrower. Either way, a cop handcuffs the two women together at the wrist and the women then spend some time with him while also falling in love, I guess. Kang also has sex while Yoon is still handcuffed to her, which is probably a visual metaphor.

Ashamed is not absent moments that work. But because the film’s overall structure is so confusing, it does sap these moments of their power. Plus, elements like lighting further tank the film’s emotional resonance. A late-film emotional climax happens outside in the dark and I can’t see shit. All I know is there’s some women who are almost certainly named Ji-woo having a really bad time and scream-crying in impenetrable darkness.

Apparently, the film’s central question is, “what is it like to love a woman?” Yet Ashamed isn’t that interested in answering it. When Jung directly asks Yoon, she even follows up with a comment about how she knows about lesbianism and it’s not that unusual. I agree, but that seems like a bad perspective for a film that’s apparently about love between women. It feels like Ashamed picked a central topic even they thought was boring. Perhaps that’s why this story is so convoluted and has so much extra shit on top of its lesbian love story. As much as I don’t think love between women is unusual, god knows I’ve seen films with a very simple central story about love between women and how society treats them. Good ones, even! Ashamed almost feels like it’s trying to distract you from its core thesis and I don’t understand why.

Mostly, I just found Ashamed confusing. And to such a level that I really don’t have any other emotions about the film. The story is overly complicated for what it actually is at its core. And the further use of elements like editing and visual metaphor do nothing but further confuse me as a viewer. Any artistic success in certain thoughts or lines of dialogue is heavily overtaken by my own confusion about what is going on, which character is which and why should I care about any of this.

Overall rating: 3/10

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