La vierge mise à nu par ses prétendants

According to the synopsis in the film festival booklet, the movie plays like a Rashomon of a love triangle. Well... kind of.

Despite its provocative title, Virgin is essentially a romance, with a deflowering at the end of it. But it is told from the different points of view of the two lovers. The black and white film starts off with the man, Jaewoon, begging his girlfriend to meet him.

We then go through 7 days/stages of the courtship from his point of view, and then the same 7 days/stages as how Soojung saw it. I saw the POVs as memories of what the two protagonists had of their courtship.

The differences are subtle but I felt they were very real. People tend to have different perception of the same event, or they may remember different salient points, or even mix up memories.

For example, in one kissing scene, Jaewoon remembers sweeping a fork off the table while Soojung thought it was a spoon. The events and dialogue also get mixed up as memories get hazy. For instance, a particular dialogue about drinking took place in two places in the different versions.

I really enjoyed the movie even though I do not like the romance genre in general. It was something I could relate to. Especially in courtships, both parties usually have slightly differing views of how it REALLY happened.

Well, here's a Korean movie that even lovers of Godard (and Bergman, to a lesser extent) might love. Shot in radiant black-and-white (gorgeous), this film tells the story of a young woman Soo-jung (LEE Eun-Joo), "courted" by one acquaintance (and also pursued by her boss) in two equal parts -- first from the perspective (mostly) of the young woman's would-be lover, and then (from the top) from the woman's point of view (but again, mainly only mostly). Sometimes the matching scenes are almost identical, other times they are radically different. Most interesting, however, are the matches when only relatively small details are slightly differently remembered (?). This could be sterile and abstract (and some critics have complained), but I found it quite accessible and enjoyable. Our heroine's sensibilities seem a bit more robust (despite her virginal state) than those of either of her men -- and the "second time around" of the story often seems a bit more humorous. Due to my imperfect memory, several viewing will be required until I can pull all the pierces of this film together. Nonetheless, I'd say this is very much worth watching.

The director has a knack for dissecting (or exposing) the human psychology, especially when it comes to sexual or relationship encounters in general. The nuances that we all experience intimately, but rarely discuss, are ever-present in his films, which is an aspect I enjoy. I also enjoy his minimalist approach to film making. Again, the meat of the story is about the relationships between people, so make-up and stunts are almost non-existent. I read somewhere that the director really likes the idea of spontaneity, and this is especially evident when he casts the extras. Watch how the extras look and behave like "normal" people. In other words, their roles are not contrived or over-played. If you enjoyed other works of this director (Sang-soo Hong), then this is a must see.

The Korean movie Oh! Soo-jung was shown in the U.S. with the terrible title, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000). It was written and directed by Sang-soo Hong.

Eun-ju Lee stars as Soo-jung, a young woman who is a script-writer for a TV series, produced by Young-soo (played by Moon Sung-keun). Jae-hoon (portrayed by Jeong Bo-seok) is a wealthy art gallery owner. Young-soo hopes to get Jae-hoon to finance a film that he is directing.

Soo-jung is very beautiful, and both men would like to get into bed with her. As the title suggests, she is a virgin, although whether she would like to stay a virgin is never clear.

Sang-soo Hong is an interesting director, but you'll have to decide whether you like his style. The characters talk, smoke, and eat out at what I think are the Korean equivalent of our diners. Scenes start and stop almost at random. Sometimes we see the same scene from a slightly different point of view. The dialog is almost the same, but not quite.

One scene stops in the middle, and then picks up later in the movie. The movie isn't preseted in a linear fashion. Sometimes we see flashbacks of how scenes begin after we've viewed the scene itself.

The movie is all about sex, but we don't actually see much sex. There's one sex scene that's hard to watch. It's consensual--sort of--but it's about as erotic as the Korean dish kimchi.

We had seen another film by Sang-soo Hong, Claire's Camera (2017), and enjoyed it. That was a hit, but this was a miss.

The movie worked well on the small screen. It's shot in grim black and white, which is OK. I don't think it would have been improved by color. The film has an adequate IMDb rating of 7.0. I didn't think it was quite that good--I gave it a 6.

A VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS

One of the more colorful movie titles in history belongs to a film that was shot in black and white. However, the English title is a great deal more lurid than the original Korean title (¡°Oh! Soo-Jung!¡±), and is more suggestive of a 1960s Suzuki Seijun sex potboiler than a deliberately paced b/w art film. ¡°Virgin¡± IS ostensibly about the deflowering of a film director¡¯s young assistant, but in fact it¡¯s much more content to linger upon and play around with the little details that precede the big event. Soo-Jung¡¯s ¡°bachelors¡± are the down-and-out indie film director who she works for and the director¡¯s independently wealthy and seemingly none-too-bright drinking buddy. The central conceit of the film is that the same story (the wooing of Soo-Jung) is told twice (Hong likes to divide his films into interrelated halves), from different perspectives. Although whose perspective each segment is taken from is a little unclear (I assume that Part One is the rich guy¡¯s view and Part Two is Soo-Jung¡¯s, but that seems to create a couple of problems). The changes range from the minor to the quite grand (Soo-Jung is pawed on in a back alley by a different suitor in each half). What it all adds up to is a kind of cosmic game of chance. Two different sets of events build inexorably to the same result. Unlike Hong¡¯s other two recent films (I haven¡¯t seen ¡°The Day a Pig Fell in a Well¡±), the events of the first half of the film don¡¯t in any way dictate what happens in the second. But in ¡°Virgin¡± it is unclear what is truth and what is fiction, and I¡¯m not sure that any of the characters in the film can be trusted as far as they can be thrown. But what is real and what is imagined is not of primary importance. What is important is that the scheme allows for Hong to dwell on his favorite themes: chance disconnection, male/female relationships and what he seems to feel is the spiritual vacuity of modern Korea. Seems this vacuum doesn¡¯t just exist in Korea. Hong shares many of the same sympathies and stylistic traits with Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang and the Finn Aki Kaurismaki, i.e. a free-floating style that lacks what can be called a conventional plot, a dislike of excess cutting, muted acting, a predilection for silence and sparing use of soundtrack music, a subtle, dark sense of humor, and a rather bleak view of modern existence. Not to say that these filmmakers are the same, because each is certainly distinctive in his own way, but all three seem to fixate on a problem that is not endemic only to their particular locales (as firmly rooted in those locales as they all may be). Hong¡¯s films are neither entertaining nor reassuring, but for those who prefer substance to fireworks and cliche in their cinema, his works continue to reveal why he is among the best directors working today. It¡¯s a shame he isn¡¯t better known, either here in Korea or abroad.