A Woman Chasing a Killer Butterfly starts off innocently enough, with a group of university students taking a bus out to the countryside for a picnic. But the youth film aesthetic will prove short-lived. A dour history student named Yong-bin chases after a butterfly, but a woman sitting nearby offers him a glass of juice spiked with poison, and he nearly dies. After being released from the hospital, he goes home feeling depressed and tries to kill himself. But he is interrupted by an elderly book salesman, who insists that the way to regain one’s will to live is to kill someone else. Driven to distraction, Yong-bin decides to kill the bookseller.
These opening sequences can be seen as a comparatively realistic prelude before the three-part film tumbles headlong into the realm of the fantastic, with talking severed heads, a reincarnated 2000-year old woman, and slain humans transforming into butterflies.
One can imagine what the pitching session for this film might have been like. But if there was one advantage to the filmmaking system of the 1970s, it was that many producers just viewed Korean films as a way to fulfill the nation’s import quota, and so directors (assuming they avoided political content) were free to ignore mainstream sensibilities. On the other hand, one of the great disadvantages of the 1970s filmmaking system was that directors were given only the bare minimum of resources, and this can be seen in the work’s creatively-imagined but crudelyrealized special effects.
At first glance A Woman Chasing a Killer Butterfly might seem to be nothing more than the trashiest of B-movies, but director Kim Ki-young, who is known to pepper his films with references to Nietzsche and Freud, is hardly fooling around. His themes centered on death, sex, and the will to live, reappear throughout the film in different guises, tantalizing viewers with hidden meanings but never providing any easy interpretations.
Throughout his filmography Kim has often contrasted the rational and the scientific with more primitive, spiritual or fantastic forces.
His works can be seen as the very opposite of the so-called “enlightenment films” favored by the Park Chung Hee regime, in which modernization and industrialization leads inexorably to a brighter and more prosperous future. Not only does chaos reign and thrive in the world of Killer Butterfly, but it mocks the very notion of rationality or progress. In one sense, this might be the perfect comment on an authoritarian era in which order was enforced from above, but turmoil seethed beneath the surface.
Darcy Paquet