Café noir

Since the Nouvelle Vague, no one in France is surprised if a critic makes a film, but in most countries it remains unusual. Jung Sung-Il, one of the most important Korean film critics, makes his debut with an incredibly successful tragic romantic stream-of-consciousness film lasting more than three hours, in which he does not hide his admiration for his sources.
On the contrary, that capability to admire is a creative power here. The story - about a music teacher who is left in the lurch on Christmas Eve by his lover - is borrowed from Dostoevsky's White Nights and Goethe’s The Suffering of the Young Werther. The action has been moved to contemporary Seoul. And anyone who shoots film there cannot avoid politics, police and demonstrations: the dreamy Café noir is right up there in the middle of the real world. With its homages to Hong Sang-Soo, Bong Joon-Ho, Park Chan-Wook and Kim Ki-Duk it is also a compendium of ten years of recent Korean film history.