Nothing like a good dose of gonorrhea to open a film… Oh, and to witness a doctor being stabbed by a crazed lady (maybe a jilted lover?). And then collecting a young boy and hiding him from the authorities as his mother is dragged away screaming. Thus begins The Bacchus Lady and straight from the start you realise this will not be your usual movie.

 

Your normal film that focuses on fringe dwellers, people just trying to survive in a modern society, has got ample tragedy, with lashings of self destructive behavior and a good deal of lawlessness. But the big difference with The Bacchus Lady is that these people are the elderly — live fast, die young is not applicable. Maybe they have lived fast already and clearly have survived the die young bit but they are still very much on the fringe. Survival in a big city, moving at a slow pace… this is the story of the shadows, the forgotten ones, and it is through the eyes of So-young, a not so young prostitute, that this tale of tragedy and loneliness unfolds. Picture your Nona turning tricks in the big park.

 

Youn Yuh-jung, a heavyweight Korean cinema veteran, plays our elderly madam and it is she who is in amongst the opening drama. She takes the young child into her care as an act of compassion but at the same time starts to wonder what she has done. As a professional of the street, having a child at her side is not conducive for future business. Although technically on the sidelines with gonorrhea, she still has her hands and mouth and money needs to be earned.

 

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She rents her little house in a compound with a transsexual landlord/lady and there is also an out of work one legged male lodger too. Amongst the three of them, they sort out child care for the young boy so that she can continue her work. Sometimes he goes to work with So-young and waits downstairs whilst she is busy. Sometimes the other two share the duties. They are a motley crew and to further complicate things, it turns out the young boy is Filipino and speaks very limited Korean.

 

Bacchus is a little bottle of energy drink and the calling card for the prostitute. When they offer a Bacchus, the man knows what the deal is all about. So-young spends her day roaming the parks of Seoul, asking men if they’d like a date and then offers a Bacchus. Sometimes this is met with a positive response and other times with repulsion. This is her life; this is the life of a Bacchus lady.

 

“We’re all in queue for the last train of life, you’re either sick or dead.”

 

This is a journey through South Korea’s elderly; the ones left behind from the economic miracle and left to fend for themselves. A generation that remembers a pre-industrial country; one that lived through the technocratic revolution, a time of great change, but are now discarded and unneeded. They are the deaf, the sick, the ailing but they still need to survive and in a society that is ranked at the bottom of the OECD countries for social welfare towards its elderly citizens, life is hard. Life is lonely, but life goes on.

 

Through a chance meeting So-young reconnects with a favourite past client — a dandy, once handsome and generous, though now he is frail, confined to his hospital bed. “This is not living,” he wails after the nurse has cleaned up the mess of his daily excretion. So-young’s motivations may have been sinister to begin with but his situation strikes deep into her compassionate heart.

 

She helps him die with garden pesticide. “I really hope he’s in a better place now.”

 

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One thing leads to another and she finds herself assisting the death of another aged man, a friend of an acquaintance. She knows she is helping but she is also wracked by the guilt of her actions. It’s not the done thing, in most societies but especially in hers. Youn Yuh-Jung plays this role to perfection, another accolade to a very illustrious career but full credit must also go to E J-yong’s direction. Extracting such solid performances is one thing but to understate the sympathy and to present tragedy in such a matter of fact fashion can only be done with a solid handle on the subject.

 

She lays asleep by her next patient, he has taken too many sleeping pills but doesn’t want to depart alone. His son died tragically years ago and his wife departed five years to the day and now he just wants out. In the morning, on her lush hotel bed with sweeping views of Seoul, she weeps for the corpse beside her. These are indeed sad tales of loneliness. Each story only amplifies her own predicament.

 

We understand her motivations when she donates the substantial sum of money he left her as she prays to the Buddha. And spends a little treating her surrogate family on a day trip.

 

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So-young’s days are numbered however. Modern technology has identified her leaving the hotel and they know money is involved so the motivation must be sinister. She resigns to her fate knowing that they will never believe her, at least in prison she will be fed three times a day. She could never afford a nursing home. She finds some peace in the little boy’s mum about to be released, soon he will be reunited and return to the Philippines. This is her last station.

 

All she leaves behind is a box in the prison storage stating that she had no friends or family — she died alone. Not even her fragile surrogate family came to visit. We are born with nothing and we leave with nothing but The Bacchus Lady lets us into a world where every little thing amounts to nothing, where people don’t care about your motivations; a world of judgment, loneliness and desperation.

 

No wonder we cling to the cult of youth.