The Taste of Money

With The President’s Last Bang and The Housemaid counting as his most recognised films in the West, director Sang-soo Im is a divisive component of the Korean wave at best. His latest film won’t be the one to elevate him to the upper echelon of Korean cinema, in fact its set to continue his fate as a divisive director. The taste of money is a play on Tony Richardson’s classic kitchen sink drama A Taste of Honey, where Richardson observed the bottom rungs of society, Sang-Soo Im looks at the very top with a super-rich conglomerate-owning family, the Yoon’s. Young-Jak (Kang-woo Kim) is the hired help and our way into the scheming underhanded ways of the family that employ sex, manipulation and violence to get what they want.

The Taste of Money flirts around the territory of the erotic thriller, with the first act losing any sense of impetus or character in lieu of showing ridiculous amounts of bare Korean flesh. Plot beats are established and dropped around a throng of naked Korean ladies. Sex is used as a tool but it’s always mentioned in passing, it doesn’t really make an impact beyond the superficiality of those naked bodies; hence the difficulty in labelling it an erotic thriller. The directionless limbo does dissipate and it does improve thanks to the growing prominence of the family matriarch played by Yoon Yeo-Jeong. The only way to personify this Woman would be as a Monster and it all hangs together thanks to the unmitigated hate targeted towards her. Rape, victimisation and gang-like machinations are all par for the course in this woman’s life. It’s getting into spoiler territory, but a good parallel would be Lucille from TVs Arrested Development with a taste for human flesh. This heartless monster makes the taste of money an intermittently enjoyable watch; a deliciously evil analogue for the Korean financial élite.

Sadly this is a problematic production. About two thirds into the film when all the chips have been dealt, one of the characters tries to escape this poisonous, contemptuous family with his new mistress. This same mistress leaves her children – both under 10 years old – to get a flight home alone so she can have sex with this man. As a character who we are supposed to care about, that is the sort of logic that breaks immersion. Without an intention in the world, there are simply no characters to connect with beyond their hypocrisies and evil tendencies. There’s more. The biggest problem with the Taste of Money and the issue that absolutely cannot be overlooked is the English acting. Asian cinema has a long tradition of employing English actors who cannot be defined as either English or actors, and somehow Sang-Soo has outdone them all. Actors spontaneously break out into English negating any impact in a heartbeat. It would be funny if it wasn’t so unintentionally tragic. As for the child actors, it is as if they found the nearest kids thinking ‘they will do’.

In the Taste of Money the cinematography is patient and gorgeous capturing the opulence of the super-rich and the very concept was enough to court controversy in its native Korea. Yet the execution of the film is left wanting, in that it is solely concerned with surface glamour. Add to that the fact that this is a difficult DVD, finding where the select icon is on the top menu is an unnecessarily laborious task that can only be tackled through trial and error. Its in hitches like that where the disappointment really sinks its teeth in.