Haebyeonui yeoin (2006)

User Rating:

6.9/10   

Director:

Sang-soo Hong

Writer:

Sang-soo Hong (writer)

Release Date:

31 August 2006 (South Korea)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama | Romance

Plot Keywords:

Recurring Dream | Confrontation | Power Play | Stalker | Male Female Relationship

Awards:

1 win & 5 nominations

Cast

Seung-woo Kim	...	Director Kim Jung-rae
Hyun-jung Go	...	Kim Mun-suk
Seon-mi Song	...	Choi Sun-hee
Tae-woo Kim	...	Won Chang-wook
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Ban-ya Choi	...	Sun-hee's friend
Chan Jung	...	Guy driving Mun-suk home
Ki-woo Lee	...	Beach resort caretaker
Seong-kun Mun	...	(voice)
Tae-kyung Oh	...	Waiter at empty sushi restaurant

Also Known As:

Woman on the Beach (International: English title) (USA) (festival title)

Runtime:

USA:100 min | South Korea:127 min | Argentina:127 min (Mar del Plata Film Festival)

Country:

South Korea

Language:

Korean

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

South Korea:15 | Argentina:13

Filming Locations:

South Korea

Company:

B.O.M. Film Productions Co.

Amusing exploration of human folly

Woman on the Beach, by director Hong Sang-Soo is a less intense and comic take on his regular themes of dysfunctional relationships and high irony.

Unlike his early films, Woman on the Beach features a single protagonist that is followed over the course of the film, and while the setting stays the same, the people around the protagonist change. Although this is far from a belly-laughing comedy, there are a lot of highly amusing ironies and personal interactions that occur over the course of the film.

The story is about a writer-director who is struggling to come up with his next script idea, so he decides to take his collaborator on a trip to the beach where he plans to come up with an idea. His collaborator, a somewhat naive young man brings along his girlfriend. Of course, whenever you see such a triangle appear in a Hongian film, you know that someone's going to be sleeping around. Later, the director returns to the beach and encounters a pair of woman as well.

One of the things I found really amusing about this film is how blustery the director character is and how he connives and cons while being completely sincere at the same time. Ultimately, he only wants two things--to sleep with women and to get his scenario done. But since he needs to hold together his own self-conception of a man with integrity, he tries his darnedest to be sincerely interested in whatever woman he's courting--when it's convenient for him.

Hong shows a great aptitude for irony even yet and while this isn't as novel as some of his other works, it's a more accessible work than his more experimental pieces. It's still quite funny in that vice and folly as well as the attempt to cover it up shows up in spades, while it's not forced on the viewer. The whole piece plays out naturally and is an amusing display of the foolishness of the greedy and selfish. Not a bad watch, if you don't need to be clobbered over the head by your movies. 8/10.