Turning Gate

Hong’s perennial subject, already clear in his Tiger Award winner The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, is the way we delude and contradict ourselves in matters of love and/or lust. The more he thinks about it, the funnier he finds it. This time, his plot splits neatly down the middle. Out-of-work actor Kyung-Soo impulsively follows up a call from a one-time schoolmate by visiting him in Chuncheon, a country town famous for its lakes. There he has a brief fling with a dance instructor, who turns out to be his hapless host’s girlfriend. Worried more by her protestations of love than by two timing his host, Kyung-Soo bolts. He takes a train and chats to Sun-Young, who recognises him from his stage work; he gets off at Kyungju to follow her home and next day propositions and beds her. Now Kyung-Soo is the one doing the begging – and Sun-Young has an answer which knocks him sideways. Amazingly, Hong wrote all this day-by-day during the filming. The result is not loose improvisation but plotting as intricate and detailed as anything you’d find in 19th-century fiction, a form explicitly evoked by the film’s seven chapter titles. The two halves are riddled with echoes, parallels and reversals. And it’s really funny. Tony Rayns