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.
