La vierge mise à nu par ses prétendants

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.