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This review may contain spoilers
"who you are [to me] is someone who leaves....to Arthur you're someone who stays"
I started crying at the point (1/2 way) when Teo Yoo's character, Hae Sung, enters the lobby of a NY hotel on a quixotic quest to meet his first love, Nora Moon. The soundtrack kicks into high gear with slowed chords and intense swelling volume. The flashbacks previous to this had simply the discreet continuous background hum of NY, Seoul and Toronto which is never bothersome. After abt 20 minutes points of music begin to well up through it , starting while HS is on his military service.
Great movies have a series of carefully framed and placed lines which reverberate backwards reinterpreting the scenes beforehand, and forwards to color what is to come. To quote them is often to misinterpret or spoil a movie, so I use one to just point to the frame of the story, only a very mild spoiler.
The lines above are from the very first scene of the movie, but they are unheard until the scene is played out in realtime later. Hae Sung sits at a bar in NY with Nora and her husband Arthur Zaturansky, the night before HS returns home to Seoul. He and Nora chat casually in Korean, using references to drama plotlines to knit together their different understandings and feeling,s about their meetings and partings, now and in the past. Arthur can only vaguely follow their conversation, but he (graciously) trusts Nora and I think partially understands that a continuing friendship that includes him might exist.
Because both Nora and Arthur are writers, HS's interactions with them are both more and less perilous. More because imaginary scenarios have the emotional power to destabilize emotions, but less because a writer's curiousity confers a sort of double vision of recording and thinking about lived emotions while experiencing them, which slows reaction times. Teo Yoo's emotions (as HS) wash across his face but Greta Lee's face (as NM) catches light while she looks at him and we think -- is he flirting, does she resist it, what are these feelings? The movie is in English, and she is the POV, the way we see HS. As viewers of kdrama the juxtaposition of the felt lives of Korea and the US hurts to watch, just as within Nora Moon the collision of her past and present hurts.
Teo Yoo is an interesting actor in that he is fully bi/tri lingual, and intelligently so -- it makes him especially able to navigate these cross-cultural scripts. The soundtrack was composed by two members of a band called the Grizzly Bear -- why do I know this? Because I was sure the composer/sound editors had to be Korean, they were so dominantly in emotional control, so I looked them up and they werent. The cinematography is gorgeous. My favorites: a Staten Island Ferry ride, the bar scene and the flashbacks to childhood in Seoul where the mess of electrical lines above the streets reminds me of the innocence of 2006 Seoul in One Fine Day.
Great movies have a series of carefully framed and placed lines which reverberate backwards reinterpreting the scenes beforehand, and forwards to color what is to come. To quote them is often to misinterpret or spoil a movie, so I use one to just point to the frame of the story, only a very mild spoiler.
The lines above are from the very first scene of the movie, but they are unheard until the scene is played out in realtime later. Hae Sung sits at a bar in NY with Nora and her husband Arthur Zaturansky, the night before HS returns home to Seoul. He and Nora chat casually in Korean, using references to drama plotlines to knit together their different understandings and feeling,s about their meetings and partings, now and in the past. Arthur can only vaguely follow their conversation, but he (graciously) trusts Nora and I think partially understands that a continuing friendship that includes him might exist.
Because both Nora and Arthur are writers, HS's interactions with them are both more and less perilous. More because imaginary scenarios have the emotional power to destabilize emotions, but less because a writer's curiousity confers a sort of double vision of recording and thinking about lived emotions while experiencing them, which slows reaction times. Teo Yoo's emotions (as HS) wash across his face but Greta Lee's face (as NM) catches light while she looks at him and we think -- is he flirting, does she resist it, what are these feelings? The movie is in English, and she is the POV, the way we see HS. As viewers of kdrama the juxtaposition of the felt lives of Korea and the US hurts to watch, just as within Nora Moon the collision of her past and present hurts.
Teo Yoo is an interesting actor in that he is fully bi/tri lingual, and intelligently so -- it makes him especially able to navigate these cross-cultural scripts. The soundtrack was composed by two members of a band called the Grizzly Bear -- why do I know this? Because I was sure the composer/sound editors had to be Korean, they were so dominantly in emotional control, so I looked them up and they werent. The cinematography is gorgeous. My favorites: a Staten Island Ferry ride, the bar scene and the flashbacks to childhood in Seoul where the mess of electrical lines above the streets reminds me of the innocence of 2006 Seoul in One Fine Day.
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