Review by Beatrice On 14-Apr-2024
Life is essentially incoherent and the predictability of facts an illusory consolation.
Kyung-min arrives at a pleasant place, they are all lying on a meadow, they are couples, they show no signs of life.
He lies down and the others get up and leave.
It's a dream.
Kyung-min is an English teacher. He usually gives lessons in coffee shops and always asks what is the reason why people want to improve their English.
He is engaged to a Seong-hee, very much in love, who does not want to move in with him because she is determined to marry him.
She seeks him out, buys him gifts, invites him to stay over and sleep with her and drive carefully.
He is apathetic, does not seem to feel any attraction for her, and carries on this relationship by force of inertia.
One of his friends points out to him that he is a coward in that he cannot find the courage to break it off.
A new student, intrigues him: Young-wo
She has a rather cold and aloof attitude and wants to improve her English to watch movies without subtitles.
She teaches piano and since he wants to take up playing again they decide to make a change of lessons: he teaches her English and she teaches piano.
The girl has a beautiful house, ethereal, essential, design, with many windows and invites him to play her piano, a Yamaha grand.
A strange relationship arises between them, he is very attracted she seems less interested.
She has already been married, and while he reveals to her that he wants something that will not fade away, like a diamond, she confesses to him that she prefers term relationships.
He nevertheless continues to date Seong-hee who asks him for the last time if he wants a child and to marry her but he confirms no.
She also has a dream that seemed like reality-he playing the piano for another.
Some scenes are repeated identically with different protagonists: the roles of Kyung-min and the girlfriend now seem to mirror each other between the new girl and himself.
Just as the girlfriend did not understand now it is he who seems not to understand or does not want to understand...
What are we? He continually asks the new Young-won, what kind of relationship is ours?
She does not want to see him now.
What were we he asks her? She replies, "We were nothing."
Can one accept not being loved, desired, rejected?
Can a relationship completely overturn one's view of things?
The law of reciprocation seems to be Kyung-min's fate
"When I write a screenplay, I try to think about structure first. Structure comes to my mind as an image, like Lego blocks that can be moved around and eventually build into a shape.
While designing the structure of this film, I came across the pointillism of Georges Seurat. It gave me the idea of combining two stories of different timelines, in what looks like a chronological timeline, with the narrative truncating at the beginning, at the end."
With this fresco that winks at the New Wave, Kim Kyung-rae's considerations simultaneously point to a specific way of making figurative art.
The director's words also call to mind that surface with curious properties such as the Moebius strip that has only one face but by walking along it one automatically finds oneself on the other.
Thus by wanting to paint only one face of the tape, one inevitably paints the other as well, a kind of interchangeable movement that can be completely traversed without interruption, as if everything we experience, dream, feel is inevitably cause and effect, means and ends of what happens.
The ending is the most obvious exemplification of this.
A sophisticated film, between artistic pointillism and mathematical tape, where aesthetics intersect with rationality while calculation eschews any predictability.
All authentic leaps occur sideways, like discarding a horse ( in chess). What follows to grow in a linear and predictable way does not matter. Decisive is curved knowledge and, especially, lateral knowledge.
14-Apr-2024 by Beatrice