Review: 1/3

Though 1/3’s title seemingly refers to the fact that this debut from Yongman Kim is the first part of a planned trilogy based loosely on Dante’s Inferno, it also eloquently speaks to the film’s fractional success. Kim, the founder of NYC video store mecca Kim’s Video, mixes East and West with his tale of heaven and hell colliding in an East Village apartment building, though his setup reads less like a Bressonian examination of sin and salvation and more like a limp joke: A Buddhist monk (Ivo Velon) and a teenage hooker (Diana Gitelman) live in adjoining apartments, and when the monk makes a hole in their shared wall while hanging one of his sketches, the two begin spying on each other and, in the process, learn how the other half lives. As this narrative is conveyed with scant dialogue, 1/3 relies heavily on Kim’s mise-en-scène to maintain a sense of literal and spiritual worlds clashing, but with neither its prosaic direction nor flat performers up to such a task, the largely silent action soon becomes a drag. The monk’s idealized vision of his young neighbor is shattered by her whoring ways, while the prostitute—her violent role-playing games with johns mirroring the abuse her police officer mother used to dole out to her (unbelievably wimpy) husband—finds her life spiraling downward into sex and murder, with the proceedings never rising above the quality of a decent student film. Kim plugs his Manhattan rental chain during a scene in which the girl, having just run away from home, services a bodega’s elderly proprietor for food, and the apparent underlying association (Kim’s = blowjobs with old, deviant men) proves more intriguing than the nominal internal and external struggles of either protagonist. In the end, though, not only does Kim’s maiden directorial voyage not presage a Tarantino-ish career evolution from counter-jockey to auteur wunderkind, but it also comes across as the type of overreaching indie apt to be mocked by the rude, condescending clerks at his landmark stores.