A Korean look at economic realities, class, and friendship

In this lively Korean study of how changes in social status restructure personal relationships, two young women who were friends as young girls meet again and decide to spend time together, with somewhat explosive results. Times have changed and their stations in life are now very different. One now is a lowly secretary at an international corporation, but living a relatively comfortable life. The other is a recently laid off part-time factory worker who has abandoned a hunger strike she shared with her comrades. When they're reunited at the corporate secretary's instigation and stay together for a while, their different economic realities and different perceptions of the world rapidly erode their childhood friendship. This may sound schematic, but intense acting and lively action make it real.

Jin-hee (Sung Su-jung) and Ye-won (Lee Hye-jin) were middle school classmates. Jin-hee is a factory worker turned pro-union labor activist. The intense and nervous Ye-won is somewhat exhausted by the tensions of her corporate job, a job that, as Jin-hee eventually points out to her, is at a place that doesn't allow unions, where workers have to tow the line unquestioningly. When she gets the opportunity to reminisce about the good old days with Jin-hee, Ye-won is eager to do so, and invites her old friend to come for an extended visit even though they now have little obviously in common any more other then a lingering enthusiasm for acting. Ye-won took an acting degree but went nowhere with it. Jin-hee had no such opportunity but shares the dream of acting success.

The fascination of this film is its representation of the economic and political through the psychological and social. This is a process narrative, and the process is one of disintegration and reintegration. At first the two women are like schoolgirls, going around hand in hand, laughing, singing school songs and getting drunk together. Then gradually things go wrong as the charade of comradeship is invaded by the realities of the separate and differently unsatisfactory lives. Jin-hee has no patience with Ye-won's lack of awareness of bad labor conditions in their country. When Ye-won gives Jin-hee a present of a locally made MP3 player whose company brutally exploits its workers, Jin-hee explodes with anger at her insensitivity. Ye-won lives in a bubble, totally aware of the local exploitation of labor.

Later, Jin-hee, who morphs from critic to imitator, begins to seem like the roommate from hell by the way she invades Ye-won's life, wearing her clothes and partying with her work associates and pestering her actor friends to let her audition (she memorizes a scene from Chekhov). Ye-won seethes with resentment, but Jin-hee is disturbed inside too. The honeymoon is over. The gradualness of the process is possible because the two actresses are both young and pretty. You can imagine them as interchangeable, had circumstances been different. Jin-hee's intense, almost pathetic enthusiasm for acting seems to enable her to become another person at times.

The film's title refers to Chekhov's Three Sisters, in which the lead characters long to return to the Russian capital and its imagined perfection. It's a scene from that play that Jin-hee learns. Chekhov's play becomes a constant theme. Its similar focus on vanishing wealth and personal discomfort and aimlessness of the sisters parallels the trajectory of Moscow. Ye-won's bourgeois origins grate on Jin-hee, whose family ran out of money and were forced to leave their home town and robbed her of the key to success -- a university education -- that was automatically provided to Ye-won. Resentment over this fundamental difference fills their current relationship with anger. At the same time Jin-hee is tormented by her loss of confidence in her labor union activities. Perhaps the two have more in common after all -- except for social awareness and economic circumstances.

Lee is subtle in the way she lets Ye-won's unease gradually reveal itself through little details. Sung has to be more overt in her portrayal because her character is less restrained but she's very good in what is a demanding role, and the understated finale where Jin-hee finally finally lets out her true feelings gives her an opportunity to show some nuance too. Both give fine performances, and they make the film work even though it suffers from delayed exposition and an ending that's protracted and anticlimactic. The screenplay by Kim Kyung Hyun could have used some tightening up. But in a male-dominated Asian culture it's good to see a strong, unsentimental drama about the relationship between two women. This isn't as sophisticated as the ironic skewering of male ego in Hong Sang-soo, but it's forceful and engaging.

Seen as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.