The Scent (2012)

[One Armed Boxer]

After being blown away by the intensity of director Kim Hyeong-joon-I's 2009 debut 'No Mercy' (http://www.kungfucinema.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14317), I've been patiently waiting for him to make another movie ever since, and in 2012 he did, with the recently released 'The Scent'.

Compared to the material that 'No Mercy' deals with, 'The Scent' is an all together different experience. Playing like a kind of light hearted neo-noir, the story revolves around a private detective who specializes in adultery, played by Park Hee-soon, who bites off more than he can chew when enlisted by a mysterious woman to investigate into if her husband is having an affair or not.

Hee-soon tracks her husband to a love hotel and, believing that he'll easily be able to catch him in the act, rents the room next door to the one her husbands taken. Things get complicated when the mystery woman decides to join him, and as she begins to question weather she can really confront her husband and his mistress, one thing leads to another and they end up spending the night together. When Hee-soon wakes up, he finds her body covered in blood next to him, and to make matters worse, her husband in the next room is also in the same state, both of them dead.

He finds the mistress a quivering mess in the corner, only for her to reveal herself as the wife of the guy he's supposed to be staking out, and she has the same name as the girl he's just spent the night with who'd also claimed to be his wife. From then on, the rest of the movie see's Hee-soon trying to figure things out before police piece together the evidence which obviously points to him, and is the girl who he thought was the mistress, played by Park Si-yeon, really all she appears to be?

The potential for a good story is there, and perhaps due to the rollercoaster ride of tension that was 'No Mercy', I came into 'The Scent' expecting greatness. Sadly director Hyeong-joon-I's second effort falls short, mainly because the whole somehow doesn't equal the sum of all it's parts. It's clearly a playful movie, with a quirky jazz tinged soundtrack and a black & white color palette tipping it's hat to the noir roots that are an obvious influence.

However Si-yeon's character, whose role it so vital to the story, is never fully fleshed out or given much motivation behind what she's doing. Too many times as the viewer you're left questioning why it is she's acting the way she is, and by the time the third act revelation comes into play, it's sadly too late to convince that everything that came before makes sense. Things are meant to fall into place, but it doesn't quite pull it off leading to what ultimately was an unsatisfying experience.

Hee-soon plays his detective character well, although even his obsession with smelling women's scents in the end doesn't really serve any purpose, beyond him saying that the whole situation started off by him catching the scent of Si-yeong's perfume. The movie has some nice comedic touches that benefit the story, and in truthfulness if they weren't there would make it a much more arduous watch, and the fact that Si-yeon treats us to a fully naked mid-movie stroll was a welcome addition. All in all though the various events and scenarios that take place somehow fail to gel together to create a conclusion worth caring about, and I was left with the hope that Hyeong-joon-I will go back to more gritty material for his third outing.

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[Biozombie]

I enjoyed it but thought the comedy was misplaced.

[daisho2004]

I gotta get this one also.