Woman on the Beach

Woman on the Beach is a South Korean dramedy, written and directed by Hong Sang-soo, that starts out promising but devolves into a rambling session of navel-gazing. Focused on only four characters, the film is structured as two different romantic triangles, although two of the three sides are the same two people.

One of them is a film director, played by Kim Seung-Woo. He is under pressure to finish a script, so enlists Kim Tae-Woo to drive him to a beach resort on the country's west coast (it's not clear what their relationship is--at first I thought Tae-Woo was his assistant, but he may just have been a friend). Tae-Woo asks to bring his girlfriend, a composer played by Go Hyun-Jung. We quickly learn that is not all as it seems: Tae-Woo is married, and Go does not consider herself his girlfriend, anyway (they haven't had sex). The film director takes a shine to her, and steals her away from his friend.

All of this happens in one night. We then flash forward a few days. The director is still in the beach town, but the other two are gone. He misses his new conquest, so much so that he seduces a woman whom he think looks like her (Song Seon-Mi). But then Go shows up, and they end up back together for a time, until Go realizes that he must have cheated on her.

The beginning of this film seems like a French comedy, and we get some sharp characterizations. None of the three are particularly likable, especially the director, who is a pill (he screams at a waiter in a restaurant when he perceives a slight). But his act wears thin, and when the film shifts into its second act, and he's not really changing, I felt an ennui envelop me. Go's character, who is sort of the Korean equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (the cute perky girl who saves the misunderstood hero and only exists in the imagination of screenwriters) instead becomes a shrill harpie. This film is over two hours long, and I felt every minute of it.

What Hong is after, I think, is how our fears cripple us. Each character has an identifiable fear (a few of the characters speak it loud when they are asked what is). The director is a mess of them--he's even afraid of dogs. But I didn't find that any of the characters grew, and the situations weren't funny or dramatic, just tedious.