Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

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02/08/2014 Oh! Soo-jung (The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors) (Sang-soo Hong, 2000) Oh! Soo-jung was Sang-soo Hong's third film; since then he has directed over a dozen more, most of them much better-known. (Those on this side of the pond probably know him best for 2004's Woman Is the Future of Man.) That is, in general, early on in a director's career, but Hong had already gone quite a long way toward mastering the subtleties of relationships; this is a fun little movie, amusing and pointed in one breath and bitter in the next, about humans and the foibles that occur when they interact on any meaningful level. You've seen two hundred movies like that in the past month, probably, especially if you're a devotee of the Lifetime or Hallmark movie channels, but Hong's senses of subtlety and propriety blow all that stuff out of the water. This would normally be where a plot goes, but there's not much plot to be had in this simple slice-of-life story detailing the on-again-off-again romance between videographer Soo-jung (Unborn but Forgotten's Eun-ju Lee) and gallery owner Young-soo (Green Fish's Seong-kun Mun). Hong instead focuses on character development, letting the story grow organically over a series of encounters, rather than driving the relationship towards its ultimate goal. That's how it feels, at least, which makes this something quite masterful if it was scripted; it feels far more like Four-Eyed Monsters than it does When Harry met Sally.... I want to tell you this movie is a comedy, but that would plant too many expectations in your head. But it is funny, although Hong's sense of humor here is alternately gentle enough to miss if you blink and black enough to make you wonder if you should be chuckling at all. I want to tell you it's a romance, as well, and perhaps that part is a little more obvious, but this is not a Hollywood romance. It's not even an Ozu romance, and when it comes to realistic depictions of human relationships, it's hard to beat Ozu. But Hong's warts-and-all approach to this relationship manages to let us see the warts without focusing on the warts (and anyone who doesn't get the difference needs to watch Ozu's brutal Tokyo Story for a good example of the latter, though the relationship is familial rather than romantic there). It's quite a balancing act, the kind where Hong is on a tightrope AND keeping plates spinning, and he pulls it off tremendously. If the film has a fault, it's that it's such a quiet, unassuming little thing that it fell well below anyone's radar; released in America it probably would've been passed off as mumblecore or something. Don't make the mistake of missing it-this is very good stuff indeed, possibly great (I've been going back and forth in my head for weeks whether to kick it up to four stars, since it landed very high in the 3.5s when I added it to the 1000-best list). See it, and sooner rather than later. *** 1/2 See more 05/15/2012 Bello, bello, bello. Lee Eun-Joo = <3 See more 07/16/2009 Totally lacks the crossover potential of films by other Asian contemporaries like Wong Kar Wai and Koreeda Hirokazu -- it's just too radical. Hong Sang-soo uses a Rivettian structuring device of repetition with slight variation, creating puzzling bifurcations in a story that on paper would hardly seem to flesh out a 2+ hour movie. Viewer satisfaction comes latently though to those who are patient with this thing, because Sang-soo's virtual doubling of plot eventually reveals itself to be an innovate effort in character study. As in the film's famous namesake, the treatment is entirely relativistic, as if a single, fixed perspective couldn't do justice to the complexity of the material. The irony of course is that there's nothing remotely esoteric about the subject matter; Hong Sang-soo engages in elaborate play with form, but only to illuminate the myriad sides of a very approachable human comedy (a comedy about sex, no less). Numerous influences shine through, from the Resnais of 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' to Jean Eustache to the Jim Jarmusch of 'Stranger than Paradise'. The humor though is dryer than dead leaves, and there's less feeling of allegorical hangover than in Eustache's masterpiece 'The Mother and the Whore' (though this film does seem to be whispering a bit about Korean youth mores). Sang-soo surpasses even the latter two in concretizing space, and he matches the former in abstracting the everyday. The result is elegant and engrossing. And yet it's got to be said: Films with puzzle structures sometimes come off like the Duchamp work Sang-soo's movie is named after; they may seem geniously wrought in their totality but impenetrable at the same time, composed as they are of defamiliarized elements working together in semi-alien fashion. Thankfully in Sang-soo's film conclusions aren't so elusive, though Janis Mink's description of Duchamp's "Bride" as "a suffering machine" does seem curiously relevant -- both works feature a rotation of male characters around a sexually vulnerable female, each male "actuating" desire in shapeshifting and often abortive play. But where Duchamp's piece for its sheer ambiguity expresses a potentially wide range of emotion, Sang-soo's film seems comfortable in the tonal space between bitter and sweet. This viewer can certainly live with that, and anyway this is the kind of art that makes binaries like simple/complex and happy/sad seem at least temporarily meaningless. See more 02/18/2009 A very well shot and acted film. The real beauty lies in how truthful the romance is. The love scenes are clumsy and will not look sweet and touching to an onlooker. These moments are specific to those involved and in the end that is real love. The story has two sides and we see each of them. There are some discrepancies between the two and some similarities. It seems as though each partner wants credit for the blossoming of the romance, like there is some kind of award. It hints at a slight selfish nature about loving one person. The film is slow in it's unraveling, but goes by fairly quickly. Like love itself, be patient and look for the small details that make it worthwhile. See more 11/10/2008 really slow and plodding story of a relationship build sadly on compromise and settling for less told twice, once from the female's perspective and once from the male's.....i think there was a bit of Goddard / French New Wave influence as well.....a good story, somber....but just overly slow and cumbersome..... See more 06/08/2008 def. not all i hoped for...will wait and see See more Read all reviews

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

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