Quartet… The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996), Regent Street Cinema, London Korean Film Festival

The Day a Pig Fell into the Well was Hong Sangsoo’s directoral debut and it’s a sophisticated tale of four interlinked characters that, for a man reputed to have no more than a dozen DVDs, shows an envious depth of cinematic convention.

The people in the film are flawed and erratic, especially the men, and, as film programmer Simon Ward said in his introduction, in films such as Grass – also shown last night – Sangsoo shows some influence from Antonioni. Whilst he wasn’t referring to this film there is the same communicative distance as in the Italian’s work with men often unable to express themselves to women except through sex and anger.

One of the men is Hyo Seob (Eui-sung Kim) like Marcello Mastroianni in La Notte, a writer and yet he cannot give verbal expression to his heart. He’s having an affair with an elegant married woman Bo Kyeong (Eung-Kyung Lee) who, married to the sexually stale husband Dong Wu (Jin-seong Park), is perhaps attracted to his youth and passion - everything she has lost in marriage.

Eun-hee Bang and Eui-sung Kim

Hyo Seob declares his love for Bo Kyeong and yet he is still conducting an affair with the much younger woman (Eun-hee Bang) who he is stringing along. It’s hard not to see the director in the character of Hyo, but then you have to write about what you know!

Hyo’s a fitfully published author hanging on for his next paycheck and fetishizing the process of creation, making his own notebooks and handwriting even in an age of desk-top computers of which many wonderful vintage models are shown. As with one of the character’s pagers, they’re a reminder of how much has changed in just twenty-odd years.

Not human nature though and Hyo’s true colours are revealed when he gets drunk with friends and tries to force one woman to drink too much and then picks a fight with a waitress who spills food on his only shirt. He ends up with a week in jail despite an eloquently-hollow defence.

Eung-Kyung Lee

To see what Bo Kyeong sees in him we have to follow her husband on one of his business trips. He’s a very particular man with OCD germophobia who is clearly not that important as his meeting is delayed throughout the day leaving him stuck in a hotel hoping to see his client the next day. It’s humiliating and yet that seems his lot. He orders a prostitute and asks just for a conversation… he’s completely lost any intimacy with his wife and probably all through his own inward obsessions. The woman lights a cigarette – there’s a lot of smoking throughout, I was gasping for a Woodbine and I don’t even smoke – and says that men like him are the real perverts…

When finally he does get what she thinks he’s asked for, the condom breaks and he’s in a serious spin trying to clean away potential disease as she laughs. He goes for a test and, after Bo Kyeong finds out, the result hangs over the rest of the film, right up until the climactic finish.

Hong Sangsoo weaves his four-sided narrative carefully; it’s an ambitious first feature and as the character arcs get closer together the time spent on each one gets shorter and shorter as we had towards a collision between these careful orbits and, indeed, the satellites revolving in separate circuits around each main player.

Jin-seong Park and Eung-Kyung Lee

This film was made about a decade after South Korea was democratized and times where tough with almost all the characters short of money. The young ticket girl played by Eun-hee Bang gets a break voicing video games but when she is asked to add “vocalese” to a animated porn film she draws the line. Her regular work is hanging by a thread and she is pursued by another man who

He wants to posses her just as possession drives the other men; money, commodification and insecurity are the results of the hard-won freedoms the nineties brought.

The characters are wonderfully drawn and the performances generate real sympathy and antipathy as the director pursues his vision to the profoundly uncompromising end. The supporting cast is also especially vibrant and one of them was Song Kang-ho in his film debut: so many arrive fully formed like Hyo’s neighbour who loans Bo some money and notes that he’s now growing chilli and the waitress who just won’t take any of his drunken abuse.

Eui-sung Kim and his ever-present cigarette

Ultimately you get the feeling that this new freedom requires a more spirited response from not just the characters in the film but everyone. This much is true everywhere. The pig long ago fell into the well in the UK… and we need to pull it out.

The London Korean Film Festival continues in London until 14^th November and then around the UK until 24^th – full details are on the website.

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