Director: Hong Sang-soo
Talent: Jung Eun-chae, Lee Sun-kyun, Kim Ja-ok, Jane Birkin
Release Date: 11th October 2013
Essentially a drama focused on a young woman (Jung Eun-chae) treated with ambivalence by her lover (Lee Sun-kyun), a professor of film studies with a wife and child, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon curiously adopts the form of a sort of diary-through-film which nonetheless offers little in the way of recognisable psychological realism, meaning that its principal character, the enigmatic Haewon, remains as much a stranger to us as the various people she encounters over its short running time. Sang-soo’s camerawork is understated, with a muted colour palette, establishing a sense of the quotidian and, even in registering some spectacular scenery — namely the recurring environs of the local park and mountain trail — allowing his characters tics, tears and general unease to shine through. Sparse use of voiceover and diegetic music contrive to give the film a personal, immediate quality, with the overall effect landing somewhere between a compassionate, human drama and a proto-feminist, social realist film of New Korea. Neither box, however, is checked outright, resulting in a romantic tragedy of the banal, writ small. This, of course, is no bad thing.
