"Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura's debut film also camps in a no man's land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still in utero, caught between two cultures. After the francophone hostess is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction. When she's not digging into spectacular-looking seafood prepared by her fishmonger mother (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an aspiring model gunning for a move to Seoul."
"But this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. Initially conforming to her prejudices about rude French men, he turns out, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to prise the story of Sooha's absent parent from her. She spies on him through a vent but it remains to be seen whether he's a proxy father, or something else."
"Sooha's subterranean feelings erupt in the bursts of clandestine, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan remains a distant figure, insisting on his loner ethic and sparing with details of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is intentional but this one-sidedness prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up."
The film follows Sooha, a guesthouse worker in Sokcho who was abandoned by her French father before birth and remains caught between two cultures. A celebrated Francophone writer arrives and, after settling for a long-term stay, provokes Sooha’s guarded memories and desires. She reluctantly chaperones him, spies on him through a vent, and allows subterranean feelings to surface in moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. Only Sooha’s interior life receives full attention; the writer stays distant and spare, a cipher onto whom she projects needs. Aesthetics, control and pressures toward cosmetic surgery figure prominently alongside family and romantic tensions.
#cultural-displacement #sokchodmz-setting #father-daughter-dynamics #aesthetic-control-and-cosmetic-surgery
Read at www.theguardian.com
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