Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

The director has a knack for dissecting (or exposing) the human psychology, especially when it comes to sexual or relationship encounters in general. The nuances that we all experience intimately, but rarely discuss, are ever-present in his films, which is an aspect I enjoy. I also enjoy his minimalist approach to film making. Again, the meat of the story is about the relationships between people, so make-up and stunts are almost non-existent. I read somewhere that the director really likes the idea of spontaneity, and this is especially evident when he casts the extras. Watch how the extras look and behave like "normal" people. In other words, their roles are not contrived or over-played. If you enjoyed other works of this director (Sang-soo Hong), then this is a must see.

Wealthy art gallery owner Jae-hoon (Jeong Bo-seok) waits in a hotel room to have sex with screenwriter Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju). She phones, however, and claims to be running late and expresses some doubts about consummating their relationship. Later, the scene is replayed but from Soo-jung's point of view with a different result. With its title derived from a surreal artwork by Marcel Duchamp titled "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors", Hong Sang-soo's elliptical comedy drama A Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors is a process of discovery for both the characters and the viewer. Whether the theme is viewed as the subjectivity of memory or how our perceptions change with each new event, Hong strips away the illusion from romantic love and allows us to see how ambivalent we all may be beyond our idealization.

The film is divided into five parts, each chapter introduced by enigmatic titles such as "Perhaps Intention", "Perhaps Coincidence", and "Perhaps Accident", and separated by a fade to black, reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger in Paradise. The first, third, and fifth parts take place in the present; the second and fourth parts show the history of the couple from their first encounter to the present and reflect the characters' different perceptions/memories. The chapter "Perhaps by Accident" seems to describe Jae-hoon as one who believes that reality is controlled by fate. "Perhaps Intention" describes the assumptions of Soo-jung who makes her decisions based on her assessment of men's true motives and values, judging them by their actions not their words.

From the outset, the film's narrative appears to be linear as it traces a love triangle that develops between Jae-hoon, Soo-jung and Young-soo, an independent filmmaker. The characters are very real and their desires and frustrations are palpable. However, halfway through, the film begins to repeat episodes from earlier chapters which are dramatized from a different perspective and show slight variations in detail. The second chapter is a flashback to the couple's first meeting. Filmmaker Young-soo (Moon Seong-keun) attends an exhibition at Jae-hoon's art gallery with Soo-jung to gain some inspiration for the film they are working on. The two agree to have lunch with Jae-hoon, perhaps to persuade the wealthy gallery owner to provide some financial backing for the film.

A few days later, when Jae-hoon meets Soo-jung at Kyongbokgoong Palace, he discovers that she has a pair of gloves that he accidentally left on a bench and believes the incident to be very much a coincidence. When the incident is dramatized the second time, however, it appears that Soo-jung has intentionally scheduled the film crew to meet on the Palace grounds because she knows that Jae-hoon goes there for lunch. Jae-hoon becomes attracted to Soo-jung and asks her to have sex with him and become her lover. She tells him that she will accept his offer but only when they go out for a drink. The sex scenes are erotic but not graphic and reveal the lovers' emotional pain lying just beneath the surface.

Enhanced by an exquisite original score by OK Kil-sung and the striking black and white cinematography of Choi Yeong-taek, Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors is a beautiful and thoughtful film whose concluding epiphany left me with a lovely glow. Sadly, however, the glow was short lived as I soon discovered that on the night of February 22, 2005, Lee Eun-ju committed suicide at her apartment only a few days after graduating from Dankook University. She was only 24 years old. The memory of her great performance in this outstanding film will long remain.

Hong Sang-soo really is probably the greatest director almost no one has heard of, at least from Asia if not the whole world. That said, I'm not sure I like this one quite as much as his earlier "The Power of Kangwon Province", if only because it doesn't quite have the same sense of distinct urban anomie that I love. It might be an all-around more well-constructed film though, if borderline too strictly formalist. It's too bad these are the only two films of his available on DVD because otherwise I'd make watching all of them a priority. It's funny that the film has such a rigid sense of structuralism and yet is infused with such a real, intimate sense of humanism. The film is divided into two halves (each with eight chapters), showing roughly the same courtship between a man and a woman, first from what appears to be his perspective, and then from hers (although the specific point-of-view is never directly announced and it is possible they overlap somewhat). This sounds pretty gimmicky, and in a sense it skirts that line, but like I was saying it is presented in such a straight-forward, empathetic way that it barely seems cerebral or detached at all. It's really quite remarkable, i think, what a truly empathetic tone the film has. Although visually somewhat similar to the work of the great Tawainese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, the film has none of Hou's pronounced sense of detachment or aloofness. Instead it feels incredibly intimate and humane. Still, the rigid structural devise, if not quite gimmicky, does create a certain repetitiveness, since unlike "Rashomon" the two versions of events don't usually differ in very overt ways (although there are some differences). I wouldn't normally call the film slow (as minimalistic as the camera style is, it moves along fairly briskly), but the repetition does make it seem like it drags at times over the course of it's two hour length. Still, it's overall a pretty great film. Some of the most honest, heartfelt, no-frills relationship stuff I've ever seen in a film, actually. The last scene in particular is one of the nicest things I've seen in a while.

According to the synopsis in the film festival booklet, the movie plays like a Rashomon of a love triangle. Well... kind of.

Despite its provocative title, Virgin is essentially a romance, with a deflowering at the end of it. But it is told from the different points of view of the two lovers. The black and white film starts off with the man, Jaewoon, begging his girlfriend to meet him.

We then go through 7 days/stages of the courtship from his point of view, and then the same 7 days/stages as how Soojung saw it. I saw the POVs as memories of what the two protagonists had of their courtship.

The differences are subtle but I felt they were very real. People tend to have different perception of the same event, or they may remember different salient points, or even mix up memories.

For example, in one kissing scene, Jaewoon remembers sweeping a fork off the table while Soojung thought it was a spoon. The events and dialogue also get mixed up as memories get hazy. For instance, a particular dialogue about drinking took place in two places in the different versions.

I really enjoyed the movie even though I do not like the romance genre in general. It was something I could relate to. Especially in courtships, both parties usually have slightly differing views of how it REALLY happened.

Here we follow an independent director with his writer and meet up with the rich sponsor of the movie, an owner of a gallery called "Growrich". The movie is split into two parts (which is not as gimmicky as it sounds) with 5 (?) chapters each, both with the same story told more or less the same way, from different angles. What angles are they? Some speculate the first to be the sponsors perspective and the second to be the female protagonists, which may very well be, what is certain however is that the differ in time, both are retrospects and the haziness of it all suggest quite some time has passed since the event.

This is the definite highlight of the Hong Sang soo filmography for me with "Power of Kangwon Province" as a good second. The strict formalism applied here gives an edge to the realism and thereby en-chances it which I felt were lacking in some of his other movies like "Woman is the Future of Man". That being said, I watched this two times over to really appreciate how he deconstructs from the different angles. This is the work of a true master.

Lee Eun-ju and the other actors did a wonderful job, cinema lost a big talent with her suicide 5 years after this movie. Rest in peace.