In the Mood for Movie Love

The two best local films handle their erotic material without sinking into cheapness. In Chunhyang, Korean master Im Kwon-Taek offers a gorgeous retelling of his country‘s best-loved folktale. Sort of Romeo and Juliet without the dying, it’s about the love between a governor‘s son and the daughter of a nobleman’s mistress who endures torture and a death sentence rather than let the evil new governor touch her body. The plot is simple, but Im tells this story with the panache of a musical, interweaving radiantly stylized images with the narration of a Pansori singer, who belts out this saga of romantic transcendence. Along the way, as a kind of grace note, Im quickly sketches his young couple first discovering the giddy tenderness of lovemaking; in a matter of seconds, he reveals more feeling for the erotic than all the festival‘s huffing and puffing sex films.

There’s no such joyous release in Hong Sang-Soo‘s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, whose lurid title represents a parodic critique of what so many of the other films at Pusan were selling. It centers on the peculiar sexual triangle among a virginal 20-something woman writer and the two men who both want to bed her. As he showed in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well and The Power of Kangwon Province, Hong is the most talented of the younger Korean directors. But he’s a little too taken with the Rashomon-like idea that truth is relative. Here he shows the same events through different eyes, yet this feels more like a gimmick than a revelation. What‘s terrific about the picture is not this slack relativism but Hong’s directorial assurance and keen eye for telling detail. The movie inexorably builds to the heroine‘s deflowering, all painful grimaces and thrusting hips, whose ruthless accuracy captures a truth about the pain and solitude lurking in sex that most other films never hint at.

I wasn’t surprised that Pusan‘s teenage girls didn’t enjoy seeing something like that. They were far happier at Junji Sakamoto‘s Face, a bleakly funny story about a chunky, downtrodden woman who strangles her bullying sister and, in the process of fleeing the cops and Japanese respectability, discovers the freedom and self-confidence that had previously eluded her -- she’s transformed from a dutiful doormat to a jaunty, unsinkable tugboat. While this parable of liberation is a bit glib, it boasts a toughness and originality you won‘t find in celebrated American indies such as Girlfight. Face had its young female audience clapping and yelling their approval, and as I pushed from the theater surrounded by their happy faces, I thought, What a perfect place to have a film festival.