FEW THINGS ARE funnier than someone else's self-willed misery, which is why there has never been a great film about sexual obsession that is not, to some degree or another, a comedy. Seen from afar, the absolute monoideism of the sexually besotted, withdrawing from the world in proportion to his or her mounting desire, is one of those cruel jokes that is too universal to offend any viewer much. There's more than a hint of ghoulish, bone-dry sarcasm in Oshima's Realm of the Senses; Crash fits just as well in the comedy section of your neighborhood video store as it does anywhere else; and, barring their explosive outbursts, even the toweringly romantic figures of Carax's lovely films are so frozen in their moonshine reveries that they walk about in a permanently bemused daze, as endearingly humorous as Buster Keaton.

I'm not sure Jang Sun Woo's Lies is a great film--it's more than a little glib, and too proudly aware of the scandals it will leave in its wake--or whether it deserves such illustrious comparisons, but it's as funny as any of them and more indulgent toward its characters' perversions than the lot combined. Which makes it at least a great enough film to realize the first rule of comedy: Create some marvelously offbeat characters, and then stay the hell out of their way; characters such as J, a fortyish sculptor (played by first-time actor Lee Sang Hyun, in real life a fortyish sculptor), and schoolgirl Y (Kim Tae Yeon, a model), who has chosen the older man to be her first lover. We are informed in voice-over of the events preceding the film's opening, and Y's selection (hardly anything in Lies occurs when the two are apart: J's three-month sojourn to Paris is the matter of a single edit, as if the world ceases to exist when they are separated); of how J had been chatting up one of Y's friends, how he'd called looking for the other, how that brief call led to a furious bout of phone sex. She rides the train into town, he picks her up at the station, they go to a hotel room, strip naked, and have sex. (Y's initiation is counted down by dryly obscene intertitles: First Hole, Second Hole, Third Hole.) That's the movie's first quarter-hour. Later she takes the train into town, J picks her up at the station, and they go to a hotel to have sex. Once or twice they have dinner together, as prelude to hotel room, naked, sex.

During one of their trysts, J pulls out a switch and suggests a bit of whipping; Y agrees enthusiastically, and for another 10 or 15 minutes we watch as her ass is splotched red with welts. Soon J is up for punishment as well, bending over for his whackings as Y becomes more and more the initiator of the fantasy world. Much of the couple's growing fondness for one another is related through their excitement in finding new instruments of torture: They ooh and aah over the sticks at a construction site like an engaged couple registering at Target.

Like the 1996 novel upon which it's based, Lies was promptly banned in its native South Korea--which probably pleased Jang to no end. (A censored version has subsequently been shown.) Flagrantly designed to stir up controversy, the film could have been a one-trick pony, its explicit depiction of two S&M fanciers whose mutual need spirals ever inward (and I haven't even mentioned the coprophagy) nothing more than a trite, obvious attempt at "subversiveness." But the film is smarter and actually more tender than that, honoring the lunatic self-absorption of the pair ("I prefer to celebrate the individual," Y says, dismissing with a giggle a sign-up sheet to join the environmental movement), celebrating it with occasional bursts of sunflared slow-motion lyricism or the constantly giddy, driving beat of Dal Palan's music. Most of the time, however, the cramped but comfortable intimacy of Jang's hand-held camera is of a piece with the film's scruffy self-reflexivity; not the least of the lies referenced in the title is that you're watching anything more than a movie. Jang interviews the two actors about their concerns over appearing naked so often; a particularly violent and emotional scene is halted by the director walking on the set to comfort the vulnerable Kim as she sobs in pain. At moments like this, Lies opens up to reveal a world beyond even the one from which Y and J are so resolutely withdrawing; a betrayal of the two characters, perhaps, but undeniably a damned funny one.