I’ve been in Busan for a couple of days now, just enough time to shake off my jet lag, try a few delicious food trucks outside the festival’s cinema center, and catch a few titles in the festival’s vaunted main competition. The three films in this dispatch, though directed by men, are all female-driven works that explore the weight of loss, denial, and roads not taken in their protagonists’ lives. Two feature three separate generations of women in inspiring tales, while the other is an outlandish Korean horror film. They all feature, to varying degrees, enlivening performances.
Often surprising and immensely delightful, writer/director Shūichi Okita’s “Satoko Always” chronicles the emotional lives of three aspiring female writers, each named Satoko, as they confront the obstacles that stand between them and their novelistic passion. For each, writing is a vocation deep in their souls—even when life tells them to focus on supposedly more pertinent issues.
The youngest is Nakai (Kashun Himeno), a third grader whose rhinitis requires her to visit a local clinic for a nebulizer. Her crush, a boy, also goes there, inspiring wistful daydreams about their potential life together. Her writerly journey, however, doesn’t begin with him; it starts when a strict teacher is impressed by Nakai’s made-up report about a recent trip to a kabuki—she was asleep during the performance—that turns out to be more prodigious than her classmates’. Wanting to impress her teacher, Nakai takes the assigned writing prompts: “write a will” and “write a love letter”—and makes them into fantastical pieces addressed to her favorite salty squid snack and inspired by her father’s athlete’s foot.
If that section is the most charming, then the third chapter, which concerns television marketing executive Nishida (Kasumi Arimura), is more sobering. She restarts her writerly ambitions when the wife of her jealous lover’s stabbing puts her in the hospital, granting Nishida a chance to write about their relationship. We see their easy love affair through the flurry of scenes Nishida pens, which ultimately swing us into the film’s last chapter, featuring the older Iijima (Hikari Ishida), a soon-to-be empty-nester housewife who feels undervalued by her husband and three sons. She conceives of a work about a bird visiting a bookshop that’s inspired by the lighthearted first meeting with her husband.
Each spontaneously articulated section earns resonance by simply depicting the joy writing brings to these three characters, who don’t imagine fame will come their way. They see the medium only as a therapeutic tool for processing the world around them. Cinematographer Kiko Ashizawa’s engaging photography heightens that purity, which shifts saturation and grading depending on the hopes felt in any given scene. And while “Satoko Always” sometimes unwinds in a way that feels like it’s making it all up as it goes along, that sense of the unplanned matches the adventurousness required to produce something special. The film itself achieves that feat.
Another film based around three women is Gu You’s sweeping melodrama “The First Taste of Loneliness.” This is the last installment in Gu’s “Shan-Shui (Landscape) trilogy,” an elemental painting style classically based around ink that inspired Gu’s other two films “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” and “Dwelling by the West Lake.” His latest take concerns a grandmother named Luna (Xi Meijuan), her daughter and single mother Jiang Yue (Xi Meijuan), and her teenage granddaughter Moon (Wang Shengdi), mourning the death of Luna’s husband following a two-year battle with cancer. All three women, who, if you haven’t connected the dots by now, have names directly inspired by the moon, wax and wane through mourning as they consider how to move forward after their monumental loss.
For Luna, a big change arrives months later when she begins dating the doting widower Mr. Xu (Xu Chaoying). Their loving relationship requires everyone to consider Luan’s emotional needs and their own futures. Moon is nearing exams and graduation. Her mother, Jiang, left her career as a fashion director in Beijing to care for her father and is thinking about returning to work. Of the three, Jiang is the most wary: Are they betraying her father’s memory by moving on? His spirit still visits all of their dreams but hers. Is it because he knows haunting her will only make it more difficult for Jiang to parse her grief?
True to the film’s artistic roots, Gu and his cinematographer, Mikiya Takimoto, visualize this shared heartache through smooth panoramic pans and drone shots that seem to majestically fall from the sky toward their melancholic subject. Is this the ghost of their patriarch visiting them by traversing over concrete landscapes and rolling hills? Is it him who animates a foggy flashback sequence where he and Luna discuss the naming of their potential daughter as they wander soul-stirring forested paths? Gu and his editor, Liu Xinzhu, don’t rush to conclusions; they let these lugubrious scenes play out, making the film feel laborious at times in its pursuit of accurately rendering the long road of mourning. Consequently, “The First Taste of Loneliness” might leave one feeling bittersweet, but this epic ode to the spiritual strength of three women comes by that bittersweetness naturally.
The cartoonish, rote psychological Korean horror film “Shaving,” from director Kim Jung-hoon, squanders the obvious potential of its hyper-meta premise. A broad take on “The Shining,” the Hong Seong-yoon and Roh Do-hyeon-penned script concerns agitated horror novelist Su-yeon (Roh Jeong-eui) and her boyfriend of nearly two years, Shinji (Show Kasamatsu), who seems lovely at first. The pair spend a rain-soaked weekend at the still-fully furnished hillside home of Su-yeon’s deceased father, where she hopes to finish her newest novel, the first since the death of her domineering boyfriend and co-author, Hyun-woo (Byun Yo-han).
The rickety two-hander starts to drift from Kim when Shinji shaves his face with an old, rusty razor blade of unknown origin after Su-yeon complains his stubble is too long for smooching. He obviously nicks himself, and Su-yeon, who’s not taking her psychiatric medicine and hasn’t seen her therapist for quite some time, begins having nightmares about a man with a black tattoo under his left ear who whistles a discordant tune. She struggles to sleep and, with each passing night, the once kind Shinji, whose abrasion appears to be growing more infected by the day, slowly becomes verbally abusive. Is his decline happening a kind of female madness, or is she truly in danger?
“Shaving” relies on familiar narrative mechanics to push its unoriginal frights forward. That painful plainness is intentional: Su-yeon needs to write an ending for her novel—she often struggles with conclusions—and often calls herself out when her writing veers toward cliches. Because her nightmares mirror the book she’s writing, the novel draws on her buried traumas and memories; it stands to reason they would follow the genre beats of the horror she’s working in. The film, unfortunately, lacks the dexterity to heighten these meta-commentaries into worthwhile observations about gaslighting, abusive relationships, and mental health.
Consequently, “Shaving” is a tiresome bore, relying on several false endings to engineer a writerly catharsis for Su-yeon. Its computer graphics are tawdry, and when the film does reach for practical effects, they’re a bit too ghoulishly cumbersome to elicit terror. Roh appears adrift in a character who’s far too hemmed in, psychologically and emotionally, when she should be far more destabilized. Show has a demonic presence, but the film never fully explores Shinji’s place as the other (he’s a Japanese man dating a Korean woman). That lack of interrogation reminds one that every cut in “Shaving” barely scratches the surface.
