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Sent this to my film snob friends and relatives and some websites, but for those who are interested in film here's my writeup of what I saw. She's a long one:

The 11th Pusan International Film Festival

The film fest retains the "P" spelling of the town from the Korean War era, even though the city currently goes by the more correct-sounding transliteration "Busan." Dubbed "The Most Energetic Film Festival In Asia" by its promoters, it's an event that grows year by year. An Icelandic director screening his there was surprised and frustrated to find that he couldn't get into screenings of films he wanted to see despite his pass because so much was sold out. It's a big event, and Koreans waste no opportunity to show how "international" they are - they book seats to movies made by esteemed international filmmakers they've never heard of, then proceed to fall asleep or walk out. But they show up in droves.

This year was a good year for Korean films at the fest, with several world premieres, screenings of movies that had already opened successfully in the country and at other film fests (the monster of which was Bong Joon-ho's "The Host," which I still haven't seen), and acclaimed local directors testing the waters with their newest ones. Aside from some great premieres, PIFF managed to cull much of the best from the year's other major festivals - Berlin, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto - though there were also some notable exceptions (Pedro Costa's "Collosal Youth," Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales," Jafar Panahi's "Offside," Gianni Amelio's "The Missing Star" to name a few).

I missed several that I wanted to see, like Tony Gatliff's "Transylvania" and Lou Ye's "Summer Palace," because they were sold out or there were some scheduling conflicts, but I missed two that I had tickets for because of the fest's poor layout. For people coming outside of Busan, the main bus station was a long haul from the screenings, and I missed Ken Loach's Cannes winner "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" on Friday night by ten minutes. The next morning I found out that there were actually two main venues, and that they were across town from each other. It was absurd - to get to one from the other involved an hour on the subway, and even an expensive taxi ride wasn't too much faster. So I missed Hans Christian-Schmid's "Requiem" on Saturday morning by two whopping minutes and they wouldn't let me in, though I pleaded and raved about how I'd just come through the longest subway ride of my life. Typical Korean response, "Oh, I'm so very sorry. Very sorry." At least they're politely apologetic when they tell you they're ruining your morning.

I sat in front of Istvan Szabo, the guest of honor at the fest, at the screening of "Flanders." I like his American films, but still think his best work was in Hungary in the 1960s. I wanted to talk to him but I wimped out, the lights went down, and immediately after the film he scurried off (I heard him tell his translator that he had a dinner to attend). I also saw a few other big-time directors, who for me were the equivalent of the girly-boy pop stars and actors the Koreans massed around when they appeared, met some film production people, attended a premiere party. All in all an interesting and worthwhile experience that smoothed out after I missed the two of the first three screenings I was set to attend.

Here's what I saw:

The Arch of Chastity (Shin Sang-ok) Shin's 1962 film was long thought lost, but a workable print was found in China and restored for its first public screening in over 40 years at the latest Pusan International Film Festival. This film, shot in 'scope, is a rather common sort of story in east Asia about the battle of tradition and modernity in the minds and hearts of the people. The film is set in a period of not-too-distant Korean past, perhaps the turn of the century (it's never made clear). In the beginning of the film a widow is shown her in-laws' family scroll, hung over the doorway, on which is written the old adage, "A man cannot serve two kings, and a woman cannot serve two husbands." The young widow is expected to be chaste for the rest of her days after the tragic loss of her pre-adolescent, crybaby husband. She is told by her old grannie-in-law, who was also widowed young,"Whenever I felt the urge to be with a man, I'd take this little knife and stab it into my thigh, like this," and then demonstrates.

Meanwhile, a lusty young farmhand rolls into town and remarks at how the forces of modern thinking have started to make themselves felt in the long years since his absence ("Even the old teacher has cut off his topknot!"). He soon falls in love with the widow, but she must keep her virtue and her in-laws' good name intact. One night the farmhand, unable to control himself any longer after finding himself stuck in the barn with the widow to avoid the rain, decides it is time for them to consummate their relationship - and the widow ends up pregnant. Problems ensue.

Far from being bad, "The Arch of Chastity" is still pretty creaky and dated, and much of the acting is a little broad. Like many Japanese movies of the previous decades, the female character is willing to completely destroy any chance she may have at happiness because she's so stubbornly willing to martyr herself for her virtue. The family is horrified on finding out that she's pregnant and keep her out of sight until she has her baby - then they give the baby to the father and tell him to leave town and never return. The topper is at the end of the film, when the widow is old and poor and still stuck taking care of the grandmother who never dies. The grandmother hates the woman passionately for breaking her chastity vow, and uses every chance to spew bile at her. Then the son, now fully grown, shows up at the doorstep. It's decades later, and everyone in the family is dead save for the hateful old shrew (and thus there's no reason to retain the front) and the widow still tells her son that his mother is dead. I don't think I imagined an audible groan in the audience.

Life Is All About Friends (Murali Nair) I appreciate this film more upon reflection than I did while watching it. "Life Is All About Friends" got its world premiere at the fest. Set mostly in a rural Indian school house, it recalls Satyajit Ray's classic "Pather Panchali," but with a lighter touch. Nair's low budget is apparent, but the beauty of the material transcends limitations in presentation. Ostensibly the film is a sweet but unremarkable coming-of-age comedy, but behind the low jokes (songs about the carpenter's balls hanging out of his shorts, peeks at the girls' urinal) lies a more serious intent. It's a commentary on Indian class relations - the rich boy's mother discourages him from hanging out with the "dirty" poor kids, and the teacher only uses the switch on the lower-class boys - and on the indifference of the society to the plight of the poor. Throughout there are hints of the dark turn it's going to take in its final section - where the film, littered with silly childrens' ditties, is capped off by feverish, grisly variation of one of the childrens' favorite sing-song objects of ridicule.

Murali Nair has received some acclaim for his previous films (he won the Camera d'or at Cannes for his film "Throne of Death"). "Life Is All About Friends" is occasionally undermined by amateurishness in direction and performances, but it leaves an impression. Nair is a filmmaker to watch.

The Optimists (Goran Paskaljevic) Another pitch-black comedy from the director of "Cabaret Balkan," "The Optimists" is a similar gathering of loosely connected tales set in modern-day Serbia. In the film's gripping opening sequence a man drifts through a village completely submerged by floodwater and offers the gift of "optimism" via hypnosis to its depressed populace huddled in a warehouse; in the end of the segment he is revealed as a mental institute escapee. In another an enraged factory worker wants to kill his slick mobster boss after the boss rapes his daughter. The cops are all owned by the boss, none of the worker's friends offers to help him seek justice, and his wife pleads with him not to go through with anything rash ("What would we do if you're arrested?"). The man ends up apologizing to the boss for "offending" him, and getting his daughter to do the same - she'd bitten off part of the thug's ear as he was foisting himself on her, and she mumbles an apology for being so "inconsiderate."

At turns horrible and funny, "The Optimists" suffers under the weight of what one imagines can only be the director's unkind view of his countrymen. Serbians are stupidly optimistic despite whatever hell may befall them, and the country is a swamp (visualized in the film's opening segment) where crooks and con men rule. In the few instances of anyone showing genuine kindness, he who does so ends up getting screwed for it, and perhaps it's best that it remains every man for himself. The cynicism of the film leaves an unpleasant taste, though it does have some darkly hilarious stretches.

Flanders (Bruno Dumont) Dumont provides the downer of the festival, as three rural farm fellows sign up to go to war in an unnamed Muslim country. Back at home the town *beep* pines over the two she was having sex with, and eventually has a mental breakdown. Thousands of miles away the boys find their squad decimated and the survivors drifting around the desert, raping local women, looting, and shooting kids. It all makes one wonder what Dumont is getting at - the director has a background in philosophy but chooses to center his films on inarticulate neanderthal types, but to illustrate what? The film is certainly powerful, and Dumont can pull a great tour de force, but there's a deep strain of nihilism that runs through each of his films that I find distasteful. The director draws parallels between life on the farm, where a couple of the lads have a turn rutting the pretty local girl who unflinchingly gives herself to them, and their war outpost, where they drag a woman out of her house and take turns with her in a kind of redneck hoo-rah. But Dumont is almost comically lacking in any kind of warmth, good graces, or humor, and his relentlessly bleak view of an animalistic
humanity gets to be too much. At least "The Optimists" made me laugh.

Bloody Tie (Choi Ho) After watching Shin Sang-ok's 1962 film "The Arch of Chastity" with an English friend who'd never seen a Korean film before, I think she expected something similar going into "Bloody Tie." Within the first minute she must have been making a huge reevaluation.

In the vein of a lot of current Korean films, "Bloody Tie" is frequently violent, contains nudity and heaps of profanity, and is flashy as all hell - and this one is even more octane-fueled than most. Starting from its ripped-from-the-headlines backstory explaining very briefly that after the collapse of the IMF economically bust Busan became a haven for drug dealers and other related crime - just enough so you get the picture before the filmmakers launch into overdrive - the film then rips down the "Goodfellas" and "Boogie Nights" alley of split screens, cool music, and bad people behaving badly. "Bloody Tie" is a top-notch, if somewhat derivative, crime film that incredibly rarely lags for its two hour running time. The cast all deliver a great show, especially Ryu Seung-beom as an unrepentant low-life, and they all somehow manage to stay afloat atop the directorial and editing excess due to sheer upping of the ante as the film progresses.

A great popcorn movie but not much more, "Bloody Tie" doesn't calm down long enough to develop the larger effects of the IMF fall on the city in general, or anything else of substance for that matter. In this respect it departs from "Boogie Nights," the movie I thought of most while watching it. Paul Thomas Anderson once said something along the lines of he wanted to keep the good-time vibes in "Boogie Nights," to mask the misery rippling beneath the surface, until the moment where one of the main characters puts a gun in his mouth and fires. There is one similar instance in "Bloody Tie" - a harrowing montage in which a woman descends into the lowest states of drug addiction - but this brief threat of depth is quickly forgotten (as is the woman, mostly, as "Bloody Tie" is, in the end, an all-balls movie).

Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako) Sissako's new film has a doozy of a plot synopsis, which fundamentally boils down to: An impoverished African village stages a show trial in which the defendants are the IMF and the World Bank, which are blamed for compounding the continent's woes by having a choke-hold on national economies. Meanwhile outside the trial village life goes on as usual.

Admirable ideal, but as a set-up for a film it sounds like a tough slog indeed. I would never have bothered with it if it hadn't received so many glowing reviews from other festivals - indeed, the Koreans must not have caught wind of those reports because "Bamako" was the most sparsely attended of the weekend showings I saw. I went in skeptical, and for the leisurely, gently humorous first half hour or so "Bamako" threatens to pull off its ambitious feat. Ironically, the film really hits the skids with its most obviously "staged" scene, a sort of fake Western with a big-time movie star (Danny Glover) that is sloppily directed and painfully bad.

The life outside the trial is almost always more interesting than the trial itself, except when the trial focuses on tales of individual struggle rather than grander speechmaking. A man tells of how he traversed the Sahara with a group of others in a misguided attempt to reach Morocco because they were abandoned by their "guide," and how many of them collapsed or died of thirst along the way. There are some powerful stories of people affected in one way or another by poverty and desperation, but the film eventually becomes a stand for long-winded debates - which have merit as topics that need to be addressed, but grind the film to a halt. Finally the speeches take the fore and as devastating as the numbers are (50 million African children are expected to die in the next five years), similar statistics get sound bytes on the news all the time, and it has the unfortunate effect of simply washing over people. Wouldn't a dramatization of certain horrible problems mentioned at the trial have more impact? Towards the end, when the speeches reach their height, one fellow cuts the power to the speakers that are broadcasting it in his corner of the town, saying "This trial is getting annoying." By this time the same can be said for the film, unfortunately.

One wants to support and encourage films of noble and serious aims, but a movie can't be used as a podium. 'Bamako" gives voice to a justifiable anger and sorrow, but by the end the voices have ceased to hold attention. It is the living, breathing moments inside the village that linger, the quiet, funny, and beautiful spaces in between - while the increasing focus on the trial over the course of the film slowly strangle the interest out of it. At best "Bamako" comes off as one of those films that's called "important" on its release but quickly forgotten - it's just not that memorable.

In Between Days (Kim So-yong) Despite the Korean name attached to the director's credit it's a Canadian production shot in wintry Toronto, directed by a woman who spent most of her life in Los Angeles.

Restless, unhappy Aimee is a Korean immigrant who spends her days loafing with only friend and fellow Korean immigrant Tran, who she's too shy to tell she's in love with. Her mother is overworked and distant, she's out of place in Canadian culture, and spends her time drawing in her notebook during her English class at school until she finally gets too bored and quits. Most of the film is shot in Korean, and it isn't until about two-thirds of the way through that Aimee demonstates that she can actually speak English. The lack of eventfulness in the film is punctuated by static shots of the Toronto skyline and and Aimee voicing the feelings she represses in imaginary conversations with her departed father, who lives back in Korea. Though Tran probably feels the same way for Aimee as she does about him, she waits too long to tell him - and by then he's drifted towards a flashier, sqeaky-voiced Asian-Canadian girl.

"In Between Days" is a fine debut film that gracefully manages to avoid falling into art film cliche. It's an incredibly rare thing to see this degree of assuredness and faith in silent moments, brief glances, and meaning underlying seemingly insignificant conversation from an American filmmaker. "In Between Days" relies on simplicity and quiet strength when so many "indie" films wallow in their own pretentious, desperate attempts to make saying nothing at all sound profound.

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang) I haven't seen Tsai's last film, "The Wayward Cloud," but I'm happy to report that "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" is better than his appallingly dull and pretentious "Goodbye, Dragon Inn," even if it's got nothing on Tsai's best work of the '90s, "Vive L'amour" and "The Hole." "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" represented the mummification of Tsai's style - the stretches of silence and static scenes where nothing happens, which had served him so well in his early career but with each passing film threatened to get old, finally found their ultimate negative expression. Tsai continues to grind his wheels with the new film, though it's hardly as unbearable as "Goodbye, Dragon Inn." The problem is that Tsai's style was something of a revelation when he made "Vive L'amour" - though it felt a little like a Taiwanese version of an Antonioni film it was actually a deadpan comedy, with a wickedly tragic twist at the end that turned like a knife you didn't even realize was stuck in your ribs all the while.

I hoped that a change of scenery might do Tsai good, and it was interesting to hear that "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" was shot in Malaysia, where Tsai was born. I wanted to ask him some questions after the screening about the differences he may have felt shooting in Malaysia, but unfortunately, like the Bruno Dumont session, questions were asked in Korean translated to the director's native language, and I don't speak much Korean, French or Chinese. No one speaks much in Tsai's new film (of the three main characters only one is ever heard to utter a word), there are frank and disturbing sexual scenes, and there are several shots of people walking slowly down darkened corridors or alleyways. All this has become a mannerism - rather than communicate incommunicability the lack of dialogue feels like an art film pretension now, rather than be shocking the sexual scenes strike anyone familiar with the director's past work as been-there-done-that, and the long static shots of people walking just serve no purpose whatsoever. Unfortunately much of Tsai Ming-liang's new film feels stale.

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Perhaps Apichatpong Weerasethakul's too new to the big leagues to come off as stale - his films continue to surprise and puzzle. It's hard for me to put my finger on why I didn't like "Syndromes and a Century" as much as I was sure I would, given how enamored I am with "Blissfully Yours" and "Tropical Malady" (the latter is one of the best films of the new century). It probably didn't help that I was running on just a little sleep, the film moved incredibly slowly, and the Korean girl beside me was snoring away by the halfway point. I was expecting more of Weerasethakul's strange, lulling magic, but "Syndromes and a Century" seemed banal compared to the last two films. Still, if there's a film of the festival I'd like to see again immediately - barring Hong Sang-soo's latest - it's this one.

From the opening moments you know you're in Weerasethakul territory - a close-up of modest little fellow applying for a rural hospital job as he fields increasingly absurd questions from the female interviewer whose story will be the focus of the film's first half... and after a time a slow camera movement over the balcony to the lush fields and rainforest beyond, and rolling of the credits. The movie's divided into two parts, the first supposedly set in the 1970s and about the director's mother - though you'd glean neither the mother reference or the period setting from watching the film as neither is mentioned, and the setting looks like a rural Thai hospital of the sort you'd find today. A security guard is smitten with the doctor, and she goes on to tell him of a man she may already be in love with, a farmer of rare orchids, and how she met him, in an extended flashback sequence that the director sometimes intentionally confounds with the time period of the telling of the story. The camera drifts around the hospital, where a dentist sings for a monk who at one time wanted to be a disc jockey, and down corridors and along the outside of the hospital, where an ominous low buzzing noise plays over the soundtrack as the camera languidly drifts past outside statues.

In the second half the setting changes. We're now in a massive, sterile, big-city hospital, and the the rest of the film is about the man. At the start of the split the same interview from the beginning repeats itself, though the office and clothing worn by the two is different and there are slight but notable changes in the dialogue. Now the camera is pointed at the doctor conducting the interview, and this is the last time she will feature prominently in the film. After the interview the camera follows him as he goes about his duties and tries to find spare time for his beautiful girlfriend. Conversations recur, but again there are differences in the setting and dialogue. The man sneaks into a room in the basement with his girlfriend (a room used to store prosthetic limbs), followed by a very, very long shot of some kind of ventilation tube sucking smoke out of another room, and finally an outdoor dance aerobics sequence with peppy music. What this all means is anyone's guess.

Few filmmakers achieve Weerasethakul's mastery of the medium and its possibilities after so few films. He knows how to convey a sense of unease and menace through banal actions or images, and he has a singular way of continuing to fold over what little narrative exists in his films until he has an unusual type of origami, the meaning or possible meanings of which the viewer is left to mull over while scratching his or her head upon exiting the theater. "Syndromes and a Century" seemed a little too plain while I watched it, yet I can't help chuckling now and then or stopping midway through a sentence to contemplate it while writing about it. Ingmar Bergman once made a remarkable comment about Andrei Tarkovsky, that Tarkovsky had opened a door to "a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease." Apichatpong Weerasethakul isn't a Tarkovsky, but he is opening doors; "Syndromes" sticks to the mind in weird ways.

The White Silk Dress (Luu Huynh) This film irked me almost immediately as it was apparent that the lead actress, playing a Vietnamese peasant, was wearing makeup. Now I'll go out on a limb and say that it isn't impossible that a servant girl in 1940s Vietnam would be wearing makeup, but it does seem to me highly unlikely.

As the film begins its heroine is getting beaten up by her madame for letting the pot boil over. She's in an abusive situation but takes refuge in the arms of the man she loves, a hunchback farm laborer, while in the distance revolution is stirring among the peasants. The acting is somewhat broad, the central situation contrived, and from the get-go it looks like "The White Silk Dress" is set to be one of those pleasantly forgettable third-world films that get a condescending pat on the back, as in "Well, it's nice to see that there's something coming from the Vietnamese film industry." I settled into my seat for the long haul, as I was well aware that the film would be almost two and a half hours. Revolution overthrows the haughty landlords, who are killed by the farmers (including Nguyen Nhu Quynh of Tran Anh Hung's "Cyclo" and "The Vertical Ray of the Sun" in a bit role), and the young impoverished lovers flee their village and settle outside the town of Hoi An, where they struggle to get by. Then, slowly, the film gets good. Then kind of gripping. Towards the end I was fighting back tears.

Technical limitations aside, "The White Silk Dress" was easily the most emotionally involving film of the fest, and my favorite film until I saw "Woman on the Beach." After a day of Asian minimalism (I'd seen "In Between Days," "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone," and "Syndromes and a Century" prior) it was great to watch a film with a story. "The White Silk Dress" isn't a work of genius or even impeccable craftsmanship - the family's struggle against poverty has it's cliched elements, and some of the dialogues sound like they've been appropriated from the words of Ho Chi Minh - but I wasn't surprised to read that it won Pusan's audience award.

The father bemoans that he keeps having children, and not only that but they're always girls! He and the wife wake up at the crack of dawn to gather and sell mud snails, and the wife eventually ends up taking a gruesome job suckling an old man in order to buy the ao dai (white silk dress) her eldest girls need to wear in order to go to school. All while the troubles befall the family the American war remains offscreen for the most part - just a few planes flying over now and then, some bombs going off in the distance. When it unexpectedly makes itself felt one of the film's main characters is dead in an explosion, and things just don't get any better from there.

Though it is something of a shameless tear-jerker, it's an effective one, and over the course of the long running-time one gets attached to the family. The acting is wonderful across the board, but the two eldest daughters deserve special mention; they're lovely kids. "The White Silk Dress" is a beautiful and powerful evocation of a terrible time. At the end of the film the remnants of the family walk away from their broken home along with the rest of the Hoi An's refugees, towards their uncertain future.

Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina) Here is a film that's created a polarizing reaction at film festivals, where some are inclined to take its painfully dull miserablism as brilliance. It's difficult for me to say that a film of serious intent is completely without merit, but "Hamaca Paraguaya" comes close. I can only guess that the film is an attempt to somehow capture the feeling of growing old and slowly dying, as that's exactly how I felt while sitting through it. First time director Paz Encina pulls off the dubious feat of making festival entrants Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Aki Kaurismaki look like directors of epic action pictures.

I'm quickly becoming hostile to the static long-shot held for an interminable length of time. Within the span of the film's nearly 10-minute opening shot (the first of less than thirty), with a pair of old people sitting on a hammock in a forest clearing mumbling repetitively in voiceover, the realization dawned that this 75-minute film was going to be a long haul. There are moments where the film very, very briefly acts like it might do something of interest, but those hopes are quickly dashed as the camera returns to the clearing, the hammock, and the mumbling old folks.

Why would a young woman, making the first film in her impoverished country since the 1970s, make one without a pulse? Anything of relevance that the film has to say about war, sorrow, and aging, loses all impact due to its deliberately alienating design. New art from obscure places should be encouraged, but art needs much more than what was on display in this film.

The Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo) Leave it to Hong Sang-soo to blow everyone else out of the water. After a frustrating beginning to my last day at the fest, I capped the whole thing off with a masterpiece. It's a long haul for me to get to Busan from where I live, and the first movie, the awful "Hamaca Paraguaya" - which I'd raced across town to see - was easily the worst of the fest. I also knew that if I stayed for "Woman on the Beach" I'd miss the last bus back to my town and thus have to stay out all night and catch a wee-hours bus for my 9:00 AM start at work the next day.

Why isn't Hong Sang-soo more popular in Korea? The house was packed, the film got a lot of laughs, and I didn't see anyone walk out, but I thought I sensed a few awkward silences. Hong hits some painful bullseyes. More than most countries, Korea is a huge movie-date place, and why would a fellow take his sweetheart to a movie that paints such a wince-inducing picture of the local men? The filmmaker punches holes in the male ego, and though his little stabs apply to all men across the board, they're also very specifically aimed at Korean men. If only every country had such a razor-sharp dissector of the inadequecies of the male half - I shudder to think. His genius is that his male failures are usually artists of some kind (in the new one, for the third time in a row, a film director - a self-depreciating touch) whereas, say, Bruno Dumont's male losers are inbred country thug types who don't surprise much when they choose to act uncivil. Hong completely demolishes the notion of the sensitive, intelligent, elevated artist type. In the end, like everyone else, they're out to get laid.

Hong's women rarely emerge unscathed, either, but they're usually smarter and more grounded than the men. Their fatal flaw is their passivity. Hong gets criticism for this by feminists, but in Korea the kind of scenarios he presents on film - brutish fella, weak-willed gal - is a common occurence. The women in the director's films know the men they shack up with are clowns, but for some reason - is it that they don't expect anything more? or that they're attached to the idea of the sensitive, intelligent, elevated artist type so strongly that they succumb to it despite being confronted with the brutal truth? - they almost always end up folding. "Beach" is Hong's finest illustration of the second possibility - that the idea holds power, though the truth inevitably disappoints. The woman of the title, Moon-sook, mentions a few times in the film how much she admires Joong-rae as a film director, with the unspoken indicator that he doesn't measure up as a man. Unlike most of Hong's women, though, Moon-sook has the strength to disentangle herself from a relationship that's bound to go nowhere (Hong's women generally prefer to wallow in their martyr complex). The film has some great dialogue. This isn't exact, but this is what I remember:

(After a long night of soju...)

Chang-wook: Moon-sook lived in Germany for a few years.
Joong-rae: Really?
Chang-wook: She speaks German fluently.
Moon-sook: Not really, just enough to get by.
Joong-rae: Have you ever dated a foreigner?
Moon-sook: (Thinks) Maybe two or three seriously.
Joong-rae: That's a lot. I can't believe you dated foreigners.
Moon-sook: What's wrong with that?
Joong-rae: Look, I'm not talking about the *beep* size thing, I don't care. But, you know, foreigners are really obsessed with Asian women.
Moon-sook: I don't know if that's true...
Joong-rae: I think so. Even the ugly ones - they go over there and every man loves them. It's not fair. The ones we reject over here go over there and are worshipped. I'm not talking about you, of course.
Moon-sook: You know, I really admire you as a film director. But you really are just another typical Korean man.

Joong-rae continues to be fixated on this idea throughout the film, bursting out in front of Moon-sook once or twice, "I can't believe you slept with foreigners!" Hong's men are stuck in an adolescent state, and though they may be able to pull a fair approximation of adult behavior while sober, soju brings it all crashing down.

"Woman on the Beach" has been called Hong's most "accessible" film, and that's probably true. Though it contains a couple of his priceless soju-drunk scenes, it's his first without at least one painfully awkward sexual encounter. A concession to mainstream tastes? Or did Hong (unlike Tsai Ming-liang this year) feel that it had just been overdone, that he simply had nothing to add to his gallery of such scenes? The lead actress, Go Hyeon-geong, supposedly voiced some trepidation when signing for the film at the thought of taking her clothes off - it's almost a requirement in a Hong film. Did he simply decide to respect her wishes? Hong's painful bedroom scenes are always memorable, but this film loses nothing from their exclusion. More accessible it may be, but it's not a sell-out. The invention, the accumulation of brilliant little details, and the cutting portraits of people in their folly is still there - and I haven't even mentioned the second woman yet, or I'd go on all day - and Hong Sang-soo is still one of the sharpest, and very best, filmmakers working today.