At FANTASIA the other evening I ran into some young friends of mine, avid cinephiles every one, and they were uniformly shocked to hear that I intended to meander home to get something to eat instead of attending the final screening of LOW LIFE, the latest film by important Korean writer/director Im Kwon-taek. For what is food-based sustenance compared with the cinematic variety? Well, with all due respect to Important Films, a good meal would have been more satisfying. Even my co-viewers—those who had assured me that LOW LIFE Could Not Be Missed—had to admit that it was rather uninspiring. My friend deemed it basically a revisiting of CASINO, transplanted to Korea in the tumultuous decades post WWII; I was thinking much the same, though it must be said that LOW LIFE is not as derivative as all that. But, despite many energetic and bracing scenes, the epic nature of the story—the sort-of rise and sort-of fall of an “honourable” thug, set against the historical fluxes that alternately help and hinder him—suffers from the biopic syndrome of too much, too glancingly touched upon.

LOW LIFE just felt far too stuffy and irrelevant after the Korean romantic comedy that screened just before, PLEASE TEACH ME ENGLISH (dir. Kim Sung-su), a remarkably winning little number that is giddy and goofy in all the right ways. The ingénue is pretty but bespectacled. A common trope to be sure, however, unlike many an American teen-nerd-girl-gets-makeover genre flick, wherein the path from geek to chic is an insultingly short one (“ugly duckling” takes off glasses, lets down hair and VOILA! she’s a stunner), this gal is truly an awkward dork—all the while that I was growing to love her I also wanted to smack some self-possession into her. The stakes are surprisingly high in a romantic comedy that features a triad of annoyingly self-centered and/or hopelessly clueless leads, and actually manages to make them all lovable. The film is jam-packed with fantasy scenarios, all cute references to a hyper-mediated daily life that, contrary to prevailing opinion, here seems to actually encourage the flowering of a romantic imagination. So adorable that describing it—as one inevitably must—as postmodern doesn’t hurt the film one bit.

(Last scheduled screening is today, Tuesday July 12, 7:35 at the De Seve Theatre.)