Oh! Soo-jung

I really enjoy movies shot in black & white, because they don't divert the viewer's attention too much from what actually is going on. I felt the movie was rather slow, but nonetheless makes some interesting social commentaries on dating in Korea. Whether they are true or not... beats me. Someone said that they felt the movie shows 7 days of courtship from two points of view. I almost felt like this was the "Sliding Doors"-like alternative time lines, but I suppose either one would work. Either way, not a bad movie.

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.

Here we follow an independent director with his writer and meet up with the rich sponsor of the movie, an owner of a gallery called "Growrich". The movie is split into two parts (which is not as gimmicky as it sounds) with 5 (?) chapters each, both with the same story told more or less the same way, from different angles. What angles are they? Some speculate the first to be the sponsors perspective and the second to be the female protagonists, which may very well be, what is certain however is that the differ in time, both are retrospects and the haziness of it all suggest quite some time has passed since the event.

This is the definite highlight of the Hong Sang soo filmography for me with "Power of Kangwon Province" as a good second. The strict formalism applied here gives an edge to the realism and thereby en-chances it which I felt were lacking in some of his other movies like "Woman is the Future of Man". That being said, I watched this two times over to really appreciate how he deconstructs from the different angles. This is the work of a true master.

Lee Eun-ju and the other actors did a wonderful job, cinema lost a big talent with her suicide 5 years after this movie. Rest in peace.

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.

In the tradition of Asian philosophical and religious thought-where truth is prismatic and perspective fluid-Hong Sang-soo frames a conventional love triangle through a "Rashomon"-like lens. Like Kurosawa's seminal work, the film fractures into three subjective accounts of the same relationship, each revealing as much about the storyteller as the story itself.

The Western release title, "Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors", winks at Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" (1915-23)-another artist obsessed with multiplicity (see: "Nude Descending a Staircase", "Sad Young Man on a Train"). But where Duchamp reveled in erotic tension, Hong strips sexuality of its allure, rendering intimate scenes tragicomic, even absurd.

Soo-jung, the protagonist (her name means "crystal"-a motif of fragile transparency), is a screenwriter for public television, secretly pining for her director boss, Yeong-su. Enter Jae-hoon, a wealthy gallerist obsessed with her perceived virginity. Both men orbit her with escalating desperation, while Soo-jung remains less a victim than an arch observer of their follies.

Shot in stark black-and-white-Hong's first monochrome film since "Oh! Soo-jung!" (2000), followed only by "Geu-hu" 17 years later-the aesthetic nods to Antonioni's "Trilogy of Alienation". Here, the grayscale palette underscores the characters' emotional stasis, their miscommunications rendered as crisp and unforgiving as the frames that trap them.

A masterclass in tonal dissonance: Hong weaponizes deadpan humor to expose the void beneath romantic pursuit, where desire curdles into farce, and every gesture of connection only deepens the isolation.