Three generations of misfits live under a bridge on the Han river in Seul, an old man, a boy and a violent guy who seems to hate everybody: Crocodile. He waits for suicides just to rob their belongings from the corpses. One day Crocodile saves a beautiful girl who tries to kill herself, then he rapes her repeatedly and keeps her with him just to use her for his sexual needs. The girl, who was abandoned by her former lover, resigned to stay with him. The four characters form a sort of strange family. Crocodile is the first movie by Kim Ki Duc. At that time he had just concluded his life in Paris as a painter and, back in Korea, he reinvented himself as a movie director. Kim Ki Duk said he had not seen many films and he ignored the basic rules of film language at his debut. Hard to believe it when you're watching the movie, but it's so: he just transfers beautiful static scenes from a pictorial language to the less static celluloid. Watch the water scenes to get an idea of his pictorial visions. The way he portraits the main character then remind me of another great film debut: "Accattone" by Pasolini. Crocodile and Accatone are similar in their suburban romance of decay, in their hopeless lives at the margins of society. Is likely that Kim Ki Duk did not know the work of Pasolini, but the similarities are the result of the same artistic sensibility.
