Noir Looks and the Flash of Transgression: Trauma and the City’s Edge(s) in A Bittersweet Life
Noir Looks and the Flash of Transgression: Trauma and the City’s Edge(s) in A Bittersweet Life
This chapter focuses on Kim Je-Woon's A Bittersweet Life, a film which diverges from gangster films' conventional fixation with honor codes and sentimental displays of staunch masculinist camaraderie and offers, in their stead, a highly stylized cinematic poetics centered on a solitary city wandering. The film's cinematic city is the site of trauma, and in its stylistically disposed fantasy world, the hero stands alone, linking this film more with classic noir than the gangster genre.
Keywords: Kim Je-Woon, A Bittersweet Life, gangster film, cinematic city, trauma, noir, gangster genre
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