Haewon et les hommes

From the opening titles of Nobody's Daughter Haewon, it's very clear that this is a Hong Sang-soo film and you know you're in for plenty of drinking, awkward social interactions and whimsical humor.

It's very hard to put into words the experience of watching this film because it is unlike anything I've ever seen. It is very much a dialogue-driven film, there are only a few settings, scenes are quite long, the camera is often still and there are zero close-ups. All of these elements made it one of the most engrossing and emotionally involving films I've seen.

The performances in this film are brilliant. Jung Eun-chae plays Haewon, a young woman whose mother recently left for Canada and is coping with being alone and becoming an adult. She's a character you may think you have all figured out at first but ends up being mysterious and fascinating. There are many layers to her and this film very much feels like a peep inside her complicated mind. Professor Lee (played by the charming Lee Sun-kyun) is an unhappily married man who falls in love with Haewon. Jung & Lee have fantastic chemistry, their scenes together are easily the highlights of the film. These scenes not only make you care deeply about the duo, but are also rich in subtext. Are they truly in love? Do they know what they're looking for?

The dialogue comes off as improvised because of how natural the interactions are but is actually very intricate. The film is not only about Haewon's relationship with Professor Lee, it is about Haewon figuring out who she is as an individual and what she wants in life. Her interactions with various characters may seem insignificant but adds a lot to the film and her character.

The film has a dream vs reality aspect. It blurs the lines between the two. Bizarre events that happen are hinted at as being Haewon's dreams, while others could be interpreted as memories or actual events that are happening. But in the end, does it matter?

I honestly did not expect the film to be so emotionally affecting and genuinely heartwarming. The film takes viewers through a range of emotions and the incredible ending is deeply moving and bittersweet. It is without a doubt one of the best South Korean films I have seen and will continue to stay with me.

U R Sunhi and Haewon are mega-political-metaphorical films about the general state and fate of Korea Sunhi and Haewon = Korea, Korea on the cusp, Korea yanked around, Korea caught in its past, Korea yearning for more, Korea cheated, Korea bringing joy, Korea bringing pain, Korea trying to please everybody, Korea f-qq-d over by everybody, a Korea divided, a Korea trying to unify, etc, the daughters of Korea the future, the sons of Korea trapped, the beguiling nature of diplomatic relations between Korea and her various partners, etc I believe people had a hard time with Haewon because of its seemingly sloppy technical direction combined with the seemingly repetitive plot motif (student / teacher relationship) that the director is fixated on But Haewon is not sloppy at all, the film is free, it's purposely free from all cinematic constraints and tricks, no script, no cues, nothing rehearsed, a state of complete freedom....

I got about 15-20 minutes into it before turning it off. The acting was truly terrible, and the whole thing was really off-putting. It's like they grabbed a somewhat-attractive young lady off the street and told her to act. Also the whole thing about how she should try out for Miss Korea ( random dialogue, not important to the plot )? Koreans would say she's far too fat, so nobody would ever say this to her in reality. This movie tried way too hard and failed really hard, and it could have been really good if not for the horrible acting. It completely failed to interest me despite the other reviews and the plot ( which I saw NONE of in that entire time ). I will definitely never try to watch this again, nor will I recommend this to any of my friends. Hell, I won't even recommend this to strangers either. Nobody should have to sit through a movie as contrived and boring as this one.

The eponymous girl (Jung Eun-chae) is struggling to come to terms with her mother's imminent emigration to Canada. The day before her departure, the pair meet to spend the day together and when they part, the daughter starts to pine a little. She decides that she wants to meet her former (married) university professor "Seongjun" (Lee Sun-kyun) with whom she'd had clandestine affair and their meeting starts to make both realise what they had, miss and want for their respective - or maybe even conjoined - futures. It's all perfectly watchable but the story is as old as the hills, neither the acting nor the writing really set the thing alight and by midway through I wasn't quite sure whether I cared enough about either of them to worry about the morality of a relationship between a teaching professional and his impressionable student. It's a melodrama-cum-soap opera that does come, slightly, to an head when the couple disclose their former relationship to her friends and to her only other sexual partner but even then, I'm not sure how convinced I was by their responses and attitudes. It's not that I'm being prudish about their sex lives, it's just that I found neither character remotely engaging. The whole premiss might be supposed to be allegorical about the state of Korean nationhood and/or of reconciling their past and the present but it's the sheer banality of the thing that renders it impotent and any development of her troubled, self-obsessed, character is largely left on the sidelines.

I saw this film at the Berlinale 2013 film festival, where it was part of the official Competition. What we saw happening was interesting enough to keep us awake all the time, but the narrative was overly complex and particularly the who-is-who was not always easy to follow. Old intimate relationships got easily mixed up with new ones, thereby also crossing age gaps and other lines that ought to be respected.

This is the case for instance with one of her professors, which relationship should be a no-go area for more reasons than age difference alone. She had an abundance of intimate relationships in the recent past, all of them (literal quote) "going all the way through" (free translation: slept together). Her promiscuity is something her friends frown upon, especially where it involves director Lee. That relationship broke up a year ago, but both still have troubles letting it go.

Her sudden meeting with a professor from abroad, her pondering about leaving the country with him (in spite of knowing him only from that occasion), even mentioning these rash future plans later on against some of her friends, all of this is getting me so far as to take the hint from the synopsis on the festival website, saying that it all of this may be something she is dreaming, and nothing more than that. We see her a few times asleep in broad daylight, like in the library, at moments not fitting in the story line.

All in all, I see no reason to recommend this film. It is easy to sit through, and I had little reason to consult my watch. That is not my problem with it. However, none of the characters appearing in this movie suffice to get us viewers emotionally involved. It's all a bit abstract and remote what we see happening. The main character is also not very serious about her study, and wanders around while having love affair after love affair, so it seems.