The latest work from Korean New Waver Hong Sang-soo keeps a fierce focus on its heroine while simultaneously maintaining a glacial distance. Haewon is seldom off screen; she talks frequently, walks incessantly and hugs Jane Birkin (playing herself) with fan-girl fervour. And yet we viewers remain largely ignorant of her motivations. She's there, but only half-glimpsed, a tantalising, unknowable psyche.
We do, nonetheless, know some of the details. Haewon’s mother moves to Canada just after an opening sequence and a quiet, girlish exchange. Lonely and depressed, the girl unwisely calls up her possessive former lover, Seongjun, a married film director and lecturer. There follows a Beckettian cycle in which the couple meet up and separate, each time through tears.
Mostly, though, Haewon wanders around, bumping into random strangers: a bookseller her mother thinks handsome; a mountain climber; a film professor who says he knows Martin Scorsese.
At one level, this is a snapshot of an arrested romance. She may be younger and more ambulatory, yet Haewon is living the same muffled, purgatorial existence as Miss Haversham in her wedding-dress shroud. In common with the women of the film-maker's earlier works (Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors and Woman Is the Future of Man), Haewon is doomed to a doomed relationship.
Nobody's Daughter Haewon latches onto this dynamic as means of articulating the estrangement and detachment of modern life. In this spirit, Seong-joon ponders the fate of the anonymous men who built Seoul's Namhan Fortress and takes fatalistic comfort from the idea that "death resolves all".
The director punctuates the gloom with intriguing zooms and crashes. We’re increasingly unsure about Haewon’s grasp of reality – if she’s merely withdrawn or properly ill. The oddness keeps us hooked through the melancholia.
