Rub Love by Lee Seo-gun

Rub Love (러브러브, 1998)

Director Lee Seo-gun

An exotically-dressed TV announcer speaks of a new drug that suppresses memories; two bald dancers execute a tango, their music shifting to flamenco right before they are gunned down; holding a revolver is a young woman in a short black cheongsam (a close-fitting dress of Chinese origin), a dragon design sprawled across her back. A young man hunched over a drawing table works on his manhwa (comics and print cartoons) with a small rotary cutting device. Welcome to 2028. The young woman will turn out to be Nana, a contract killer with a thing for China; the young man, an artist who will ‘reform’ Nana, for love or perhaps only for the sake of the story he struggles to compose.

Enter the strange imaginary world of Lee Seo-gun. We are taken for a trip through black humour, narrative playfulness, visual experiment and a fair number of shocking moments. Watch out for the hairy American actor who almost steals the film away from her.

Watch here from 10 June for 4 weeks : Youtube

*Filming Against The Odds is programmed in collaboration with the Korean Film Archive and curator Mark Morris