In 2003, South Korean filmmaker Park Ki-yong followed up his atmospheric and textural debut feature film Motel Cactus with the even more haunting, visually austere, and understated Camel(s), a film that subtly, but incisively, articulates the desperateness of (failed) connection between two emotionally unfulfilled people through ordinary gestures, uncomfortable silence, and anonymous – and ultimately […]
While Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry has invited comparison to Bong Joon-ho’s Mother in its tale of morality, filial devotion, and culpability in the absence of memory, its theme of capturing the ephemeral beauty in the quotidian and transforming it into something eternal suggests a closer association with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life. And like After Life, the […]
A flighty, aimless man named Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu), insufficiently dressed in a summer shirt on a brisk winter day, arrives at a major city thoroughfare to wait for a bus, biding his time by cursorily scanning through a rack of inexpensive sweaters peddled on the sidewalk. Arriving at his intended destination, a multi-level urban residential […]
In the spring of 1999, a distraught and incoherent middle-aged man, Kim Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu), dressed in a tailored business suit, lies along the side of a railroad bridge that overlooks an open field by a lake. Nearby, a loose knit group of friends called the Bong-woo Club, formed 20 years earlier at the same […]
Adele (Vanessa Paradis) recounts with resigned acceptance to a clinical psychologist her history of failed, impulsive relationships and run of bad luck. She is uncertain about the future, waiting for the elusive something to happen, and her instinctive response is to escape the absurdity of her situation. One evening, she stands on a bridge, mustering […]
The brooding and achingly sensual Monsieur Hire was my first exposure to Patrice Leconte’s films, and to a great extent, it was this initial encounter with haunted obsession and sad-eyed romanticism that propelled me to continue to seek out his body of work, trying to recapture in some way the searing melancholia and bittersweet intoxication […]