Beotigo

Chun Woo-hee, whom I remember from the excellent 2013 social drama Han Gong-ju, stars in this melancholy urban romance as a young corporate office worker, hopelessly in love her unit boss. The cinematography is very crafty and coupled with slow-paced editing. A somber, whimsical mood persists throughout the film. I personally find Woo-hee a terrific actor and here also she is very adequate as a depressed, vulnerable young professional with a minor disability. The rest of the cast is, unsurprisingly, very decent. However, considering all this, the storyline is very unremarkable, cliched and ultimately, rather silly. I mean, all the themes that the writers wanted to touch upon here - namely the cutthroat corporate professional insecurity, the office politics, the social differences of class, urban existential loneliness, the millennial indecisiveness - all of these do not really culminate into anything remotely close to profound. Hence, all of that moody, heavy handed melancholic beauty of its photography, soundtrack and slow editing seem superfluous.

The acting is good, and that is the only reason why I gave it 2 stars. This movie; I don't know if the writers, and whoever produced this movie just had money to burn, but there was no point to it whatsoever. Trust me, you will feel so angry that you wasted Time by sticking it through to the end... The synopsis of the movie lead you to believe that has something to do with vertigo movie spoiler. This has nothing to do with vertigo. There is No point to this movie, you have been warned, make the right choice and skip right. Ok so apparently my review is too short! I can't not express enough unless you are trying to make your life miserable then watch it. Other wise please skip it!

Seo Yeung (Woo-hee Chun) is a contract designer at a company in Seoul, the offices of which are high up in a high-rise downtown. She's having a secret affair with the very good-looking senior in her division, Jin Soo (Teo Yoo), about whom all her female employees are always gossiping. She's also dealing with having hearing loss and vertigo, and a mother in another city who's on her third marriage with an unrelenting list of grievances when she calls Seo Yeung, usually drunk. Given the precarity of her life, when she sees Seo Gwan Woo (Jeong Jae-Kwang), a window washer, hanging outside the window of her workplace 40-odd stories above the ground, she notices his precarity. Seo Gwan Woo has a propensity for acting as a mime, using interesting face paint and otherwise not acting "normal," and when he notices her too, there's a beginning of an intricate dance, about relationships, love and romance; which is, of course, not without perils....

Not quite sure why this was a Montreal Fantasia Film Fest movie, it's mostly a slice-of-life and partly a romance, not usually this festival's cup of tea. But hey - I'm not a young and beautiful Korean woman, but I do have serious hearing loss and very serious vertigo* (the scene where she is walking through the office while having a major attack is portrayed exactly as the real thing feels, believe me) and those elements made this movie very relatable for me. It's not my favourite film at Virtual Fantasia this year, but it kept my attention, so worth a look.

*Vertigo is not a fear of heights, it's a lack of balance usually from problems of the inner ear, which regulates balance, such that one feels off-balance as if listing to one side or the other or always on the precipice of falling down. Not a pleasant condition.