Nobody's Daughter Haewon

I got about 15-20 minutes into it before turning it off. The acting was truly terrible, and the whole thing was really off-putting. It's like they grabbed a somewhat-attractive young lady off the street and told her to act. Also the whole thing about how she should try out for Miss Korea ( random dialogue, not important to the plot )? Koreans would say she's far too fat, so nobody would ever say this to her in reality. This movie tried way too hard and failed really hard, and it could have been really good if not for the horrible acting. It completely failed to interest me despite the other reviews and the plot ( which I saw NONE of in that entire time ). I will definitely never try to watch this again, nor will I recommend this to any of my friends. Hell, I won't even recommend this to strangers either. Nobody should have to sit through a movie as contrived and boring as this one.

Why else call my review anything else when the only reason I've written one is to dissuade you from reading the other? Haewon does not simply "go all the way" with an abundance of people. We know of literally two people in her life that she has had sex with - both of them she said she cared deeply for. They happened in approximation to each other because she was vulnerable.

This film - Nobody's Daughter Haewon - is about that; a vulnerable woman. She is strong in ways - apparently more thoughtful and compassionate than her classmates despite their bitterness toward her - yet the world depletes her. Unlike the other main characters in the film, or more specifically the men in her life, she has no vice. She reads sometimes, but rarely drinks (only does so when very upset or very happy, so it happens twice in the movie) and never smokes (unlike her Professor, Director Lee who is essentially a chain smoker).

What we see is her strength, her clean way of living and delicate countenance moving through a world that only wants to pull at her. People want to sleep with her, but she's looking for more intimate connections - maybe even just a person to talk to. Yeah she sleeps with people after they wear her down enough, talk to her sweetly enough, and tell her they love her, but how many women can honestly not relate to that? That's kind of how the world works. At least it has in Hong Sang-soo's films up to this point; a filmmaker I consider to be the most real in depicting contemporary relationships. This just happens to be told from the perspective of a woman, and not some solipsistic male.

U R Sunhi and Haewon are mega-political-metaphorical films about the general state and fate of Korea Sunhi and Haewon = Korea, Korea on the cusp, Korea yanked around, Korea caught in its past, Korea yearning for more, Korea cheated, Korea bringing joy, Korea bringing pain, Korea trying to please everybody, Korea f-qq-d over by everybody, a Korea divided, a Korea trying to unify, etc, the daughters of Korea the future, the sons of Korea trapped, the beguiling nature of diplomatic relations between Korea and her various partners, etc I believe people had a hard time with Haewon because of its seemingly sloppy technical direction combined with the seemingly repetitive plot motif (student / teacher relationship) that the director is fixated on But Haewon is not sloppy at all, the film is free, it's purposely free from all cinematic constraints and tricks, no script, no cues, nothing rehearsed, a state of complete freedom....

The eponymous girl (Jung Eun-chae) is struggling to come to terms with her mother's imminent emigration to Canada. The day before her departure, the pair meet to spend the day together and when they part, the daughter starts to pine a little. She decides that she wants to meet her former (married) university professor "Seongjun" (Lee Sun-kyun) with whom she'd had clandestine affair and their meeting starts to make both realise what they had, miss and want for their respective - or maybe even conjoined - futures. It's all perfectly watchable but the story is as old as the hills, neither the acting nor the writing really set the thing alight and by midway through I wasn't quite sure whether I cared enough about either of them to worry about the morality of a relationship between a teaching professional and his impressionable student. It's a melodrama-cum-soap opera that does come, slightly, to an head when the couple disclose their former relationship to her friends and to her only other sexual partner but even then, I'm not sure how convinced I was by their responses and attitudes. It's not that I'm being prudish about their sex lives, it's just that I found neither character remotely engaging. The whole premiss might be supposed to be allegorical about the state of Korean nationhood and/or of reconciling their past and the present but it's the sheer banality of the thing that renders it impotent and any development of her troubled, self-obsessed, character is largely left on the sidelines.

The fourth film I've seen from director Hong Sang-soo. I didn't like the other three, so it comes as little surprise that I didn't like this one either. It's a pity, as NOBODY'S DAUGHTER HAEWON is the director's best-looking work so far, a film filled with picturesque locations. The colours look lush and vibrant in HD and the shooting style is better than ever. Plus Sang-soo has dropped that annoying vignette style so that a single storyline is told chronologically from beginning to end.

What a shame, then, that it's still so boring. Once again, Sang-soo explores the familiar themes of human relationships and romance, this time focusing on a student/teacher relationship. It's been done before and even the same actors are brought out again for another tired time-waster. NOBODY'S DAUGHTER HAEWON is a patience-testing film where absolutely nothing happens aside from some dull and uninteresting characters going around and bemoaning their fates. The only thing it has going for it is a nice piece of Beethoven music which is played throughout the production.