Paju (film)

Plot

Twenty-something Eun-mo listens to a taxi driver drone on as she rides down a foggy highway. The story then cycles back eight years earlier, when a lustful Joong-shik accidentally causes a woman to neglect her baby with disastrous consequences. Suffering from guilt, Joong-shik goes on the lam and holes up in the titular city of Paju, an underdeveloped and desolate city just north of Seoul and near the North Korean border. Teaching religious classes to the towns schoolgirls, Joong-shik captures the heart of local house owner Eun-soo, despite the protestations of her pubescent younger sister and Joong-shiks student Eun-mo.

Back in the present day, Joong-shik is now the ringleader of a political protest group whose interests run from obstructing the citys plans of gentrification to strengthening relations with North Koreans. Squatting in Pajus derelict apartments, the group is under siege from an unidentified property developer who has engaged goons to bulldoze the buildings. With only the briefest of hints as to what has transpired, Eun-soo is nowhere to be seen and Joong-shik and Eun-mo are clearly at odds. While believing her brother-in-law killed her sister for insurance money, Eun-mo finds herself falling in love with him, the sole guardian and grownup in the lonely girls life. Narrative flashes back twice more to sparingly fill in the gaps on their shifting lives.

Cast

Production

This is Park Chan-oks long-awaited follow-up to her critically praised 2002 debut Jealousy Is My Middle Name.

Park had found it difficult to secure funding for her sophomore film amidst Korean cinemas currently declining investment environment, and though her screenplay won the Kodak Award and received ?20 million (US$19,000) worth of negative film from the Pusan Promotion Plan in 2005, it would eventually take almost seven years to complete Paju. Park said, "I stopped (filming) because I could not make any more modifications to it. I wanted to talk about emotions shared by two people who are similarly alone. More than a love affair between a man and a woman, the relationship between Joong-shik and Eun-mo is more of compassion that those in agony are likely to develop for each other."

Park said Paju is the perfect backdrop for this mysterious and gripping story. "When I think of Paju, I always view it as a mysterious place because it was always foggy whenever I visited there and it also sits right next to the border area dividing the two Koreas. I wanted to portray that mysterious feeling in the film."

Critical reception

Paju played to highly impressed reviews in its debut in the Pusan International Film Festival. The PIFF jury awarded it the NETPAC Award, describing it as "a fine example of passionate, high-quality filmmaking."

Screen International said of director Park, "This should help to cement Parks reputation as one of Koreas most talented arthouse directors" while Variety praised the films handling of elements of melodrama, action and mystery, saying they "make it function like a Bergmanesque thriller." The Hollywood Reporter wrote that "Seo delivers one of the most believable depictions of conflicted female emotion as has ever been put on film in Korea." Koreanfilm.org called it "without question one of the best Korean films of 2009."

Film festivals