The “legendary erotic film” that became Bong Joon-ho’s guilty pleasure
There is rarely any need to call something a guilty pleasure. If you like cheesy rom-coms, own it. If you like comic book movies, own it, and if you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Fast & Furious franchise, good for you, that’s very impressive – liking something harmless doesn’t need to induce guilt, enough with the self-judgment.
The exception is when the thing is not, in fact, harmless. It feels icky to enjoy a Woody Allen movie these days, especially ones in which he plays the main character and is shown to be in a relationship with a child half his age, it feels similarly bad to watch a film financed by Harvey Weinstein – both these experiences can legitimately be called guilty because they require you to ignore the sexual predation that was lurking just off-screen.
The same cannot be said of a film that Bong Joon-ho has admitted to loving, though the title might cause you to think differently, and in a 2007 interview with Film Comment, the Korean auteur and future Oscar winner revealed a list of his self-proclaimed guilty pleasures – it mostly featured science fiction and horror movies like Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot, John Carpenter’s Dark Star, and Tulio Demicheli’s Ricco the Mean Machine (sometimes called The Cauldron of Death).
One that stands out in the list for its dissimilarity from the rest is Park Yong-Joon’s Last Tango in Seoul. If it was a direct remake or variation of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, it would absolutely qualify as a guilty pleasure, but as Bong explained, it is very much its own movie. “It’s actually a legendary erotic film featuring hundreds of different sexual positions,” he said, adding that it’s a cult classic that was released when he was in high school and made many other boys his age flock to cinemas.
It’s hard to find many details on Last Tango in Seoul, which suggests that it fits the “cult” description more than most films that are given the moniker. Released in 1985, it appears to have been popular enough to warrant a sequel, Last Tango in Seoul 2, which again is difficult to track down. You’d even struggle to find a rough plot outline of either film, though, based on Bong’s description, it might just be a series of sex scenes loosely fitted together over the course of 90 minutes.
If this is the case, it would still be better than Last Tango in Paris, which was infamously brutal behind the scenes, because Maria Schneider was just 19 when the film was shot and was tasked with playing opposite Marlon Brando, who was 48, and there were many instances of exploitation and aggression throughout the shoot, but perhaps the worst of them was when Bertolucci decided to add a rape scene without informing Schneider.
He wanted her to respond to the scene “as a girl, not as an actress,” so when Brando forced himself on her using butter as lubricant, the horror in her face was all too real. Schneider later said that she felt “a little raped” by both her co-star and her director.
It’s to the credit of Last Tango in Seoul, therefore, that it isn’t a remake of Bertolucci’s film. We’ll just have to take Bong’s word for it that it’s a pleasure to watch, unless someone manages to find a bootlegged VHS of it lying around somewhere.
Or maybe the director will remake it someday.
