Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

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.

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.

The Korean movie Oh! Soo-jung was shown in the U.S. with the terrible title, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000). It was written and directed by Sang-soo Hong.

Eun-ju Lee stars as Soo-jung, a young woman who is a script-writer for a TV series, produced by Young-soo (played by Moon Sung-keun). Jae-hoon (portrayed by Jeong Bo-seok) is a wealthy art gallery owner. Young-soo hopes to get Jae-hoon to finance a film that he is directing.

Soo-jung is very beautiful, and both men would like to get into bed with her. As the title suggests, she is a virgin, although whether she would like to stay a virgin is never clear.

Sang-soo Hong is an interesting director, but you'll have to decide whether you like his style. The characters talk, smoke, and eat out at what I think are the Korean equivalent of our diners. Scenes start and stop almost at random. Sometimes we see the same scene from a slightly different point of view. The dialog is almost the same, but not quite.

One scene stops in the middle, and then picks up later in the movie. The movie isn't preseted in a linear fashion. Sometimes we see flashbacks of how scenes begin after we've viewed the scene itself.

The movie is all about sex, but we don't actually see much sex. There's one sex scene that's hard to watch. It's consensual--sort of--but it's about as erotic as the Korean dish kimchi.

We had seen another film by Sang-soo Hong, Claire's Camera (2017), and enjoyed it. That was a hit, but this was a miss.

The movie worked well on the small screen. It's shot in grim black and white, which is OK. I don't think it would have been improved by color. The film has an adequate IMDb rating of 7.0. I didn't think it was quite that good--I gave it a 6.

In the tradition of Asian philosophical and religious thought-where truth is prismatic and perspective fluid-Hong Sang-soo frames a conventional love triangle through a "Rashomon"-like lens. Like Kurosawa's seminal work, the film fractures into three subjective accounts of the same relationship, each revealing as much about the storyteller as the story itself.

The Western release title, "Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors", winks at Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" (1915-23)-another artist obsessed with multiplicity (see: "Nude Descending a Staircase", "Sad Young Man on a Train"). But where Duchamp reveled in erotic tension, Hong strips sexuality of its allure, rendering intimate scenes tragicomic, even absurd.

Soo-jung, the protagonist (her name means "crystal"-a motif of fragile transparency), is a screenwriter for public television, secretly pining for her director boss, Yeong-su. Enter Jae-hoon, a wealthy gallerist obsessed with her perceived virginity. Both men orbit her with escalating desperation, while Soo-jung remains less a victim than an arch observer of their follies.

Shot in stark black-and-white-Hong's first monochrome film since "Oh! Soo-jung!" (2000), followed only by "Geu-hu" 17 years later-the aesthetic nods to Antonioni's "Trilogy of Alienation". Here, the grayscale palette underscores the characters' emotional stasis, their miscommunications rendered as crisp and unforgiving as the frames that trap them.

A masterclass in tonal dissonance: Hong weaponizes deadpan humor to expose the void beneath romantic pursuit, where desire curdles into farce, and every gesture of connection only deepens the isolation.

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.