By Benjamin Sutton

Woman on the Beach
Directed by Hong Sang-sooat Film Forum


Though specific to his country’s cultural situation, Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach offers flavors of quarterlife angst and romantic insecurity for which American audiences clearly have an insatiable appetite (see Knocked Up, Two Days in Paris, Margot at the Wedding, The Savages).

The film follows frustrated filmmaker Kim Joong-rae (Kim Seung-woo) to an off-season seaside resort with friend Won Chang-wook (Kim Tae-woo) and his sort-of girlfriend Kim Moon-sook (Ko Hyun-joung). The ensuing love triangle is unbearably uncomfortable, and—after a night of awkward lovemaking—it leaves Joong-rae obsessing over another woman, Choi Sun-hee (Song Sun-mi).

Scenes focused around meals prove to be the least problematic times, with everyone agreeing on the deliciousness of Korean cuisine and their connection to a quickly-disappearing cultural tradition. That said, the director-in-the-movie (like the director of the film) has a strong hunger for other nations’ products: sushi for the former, European art cinema for the latter. By the end of Woman on the Beach, we’re left with complex aftertastes of desperately realistic characters, and a movie that initially looks casual but is actually a delicate synthesis of Korean and international ingredients.

With such delicious odes to modern relationships and the anxieties of early adulthood as Woman on the Beach, Hong Sang-soo is at the main table of the Korean film feast. Like other directors of the Korean new wave who are enjoying the banquet—Chan-wook Park (Oldboy, Lady Vengeance), Joon-ho Bong (The Host) and Ki-duk Kim (3-Iron)—Hong has an insatiable taste for cinematic fusion, combining styles and genres from disparate film traditions and simmering them in a distinctively Korean sauce. That unmistakable flavor, which all four directors share (all were born in the 1960s), is particular to a generation of Koreans growing up in a rapidly Westernizing society.

In using this sometimes sweet, sometimes sour concoction, Hong makes subtler dishes than those coming from his compatriots’ kitchens. Woman on the Beach doesn’t trade in the wildly entertaining genre-blenders Joon-ho cooks up, nor does it resemble the strongly stylized romance (Ki-Duk) and violence (Chan-wook) served by other chefs of Korean cinema. Hong’s dishes, like Woman on the Beach, incorporate ingredients from Ingmar Bergman, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut and Robert Altman, the lot served on a bed of contemporary Korean characters and concerns.