I've seen Life. Sad sad Life.

Very good film, it feels for me as a real autobiography. The experience of not being free is universal one, specially for people in autocratic governments or simply poor.

It's almost a time travel film. Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy sends a despondent, suicidal man back through his memories (in a flash before your eyes kind of way), one last tour of his sins, perhaps in search of the incipient event that sent him on such a self-destructive path. We'll perhaps find out it's no excuse for a life of hurting others, and while, on occasion, there's a beautiful scene in an otherwise ugly life (usually relating to the man's first love), the stink of his self-loathing can't be covered by popping an occasional mint in his mouth. The aging of the principals, simply through styling and performance is actually very well done over the 20 years chronicled, and I certainly like the directions devices, like the train motif acting both as a means to go back and a symbol of doom, as well as the romantic scene where a woman becomes the avatar of his first love, who, as we'll discover, was an avatar herself. It's depressing, no doubt about it, and those railroad tracks lead to a certain understanding (of his obsession if not his behavior, we're not tracking what you think we're tracking), but not to redemption.