A beautiful film, and I love how it is told with scenes missing, and lacking normal exposition, and I like the material, dealing with the May 18th 1980 Gwanju Masacre in Korea, but the film kept me at a distance, and the ending did not fulfill me, so it is not nearly as good as May 18th, another film about this same incident, though worth seeing. Now there is quite the run-on sentence, ha! As I said I do love how the film is told, especially how it starts slipping back and forth in time and space, but as I said it is the ending that didn’t really sit too well with me.

The film stars with Oh Hyun-Woo (Ji Jin-hee 지진희) being released from prison after 17 years, and trying to fit back into society. Moving in with his now rich mother and trying to cope with being released. He slowly tries to get himself re-oriented to society, and a new world to him, one where his lover, Han Yoon-Hee (Yeom Jeong-ah 염정아) has died years before, without a word being able to passed between them since he went to prison. Eventually Hyun-Woo goes to search out his old life, and goes to the house in the country where he lived with Yoon-Hee, and looks through her paintings and things and starts to remember their time together.

REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS…

Hyun who remembers the time before his prison when he was on the run after the Gwanju massacre, hiding out, and trying to keep under the radar, barely keeping in contact with his friends. Yoon-Hee, who was a school teacher, took him in, and eventually got him to love her. The thing is as more and more of his friends were arrested, he felt more distance from her, and eventually against her wishes goes and turns himself in, and is arrested for 17 years, without being able to see her.

We then see the world from Yoon-Hee’s point of view, where she took this guy in, and loved him, and he left her. Even worse she was pregnant, and because she was brought in for having hardboard him, she is not allowed to contact him to even let him know that she is pregnant, so all she can do is have the child and raise it herself.

Yoon-Hee did leave her daughter with her mother, as she went to college, and took in a group of young radicals, as she painted. And she almost had a romance, but really couldn’t do it, and she painted and smoked, and eventually came down with cancer.

Yoon-Hee then went back to the house, and painted for the end of her life, until she died.

Hyun Woo in the present looks at the paintings, and finds out from the women whose house it is, where his daughter is, and he calls her and sets up a meeting, pretending to be a friend of her parents.

Hyun Woo meets his beautiful 17 year old daughter and gives her a painting from her mother, and the daughter tells him to not stay away for so long, seemingly not mad with him at all, for never having seen him, and having left her mother alone. And we see Hyun Woo trying to push away the ghost of Yoon-Hee who he also sees there.

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Now I did really enjoy the film up into the ending, but the fact that the daughter was so flippant over the father she had never seen before and who didn’t even admit to who he was, really threw me off. She says she was mad at her mom for leaving her, but now just missed her, but who wouldn’t be angry at their father, especially when he won’t even admit who he is.

Still I did love how the film was told and put together, more like a novel than a movie, and it really works.