[K-Movie Night] Josée

by Dramaddictally

Welcome to K-Movie Night — a once-a-month feature where we microwave some popcorn, put on a face mask, and get cozy with a Korean movie from yesteryear. With so many films finally streaming (with subs!), now is the time to get caught up on all those movies we missed featuring our favorite drama actors.

Each month, we’ll pick a flick, write a review, and meet you back here to discuss whether or not it’s worth a watch. Super simple. All you have to do is kick up your feet and join us in the comments!

 
MOVIE REVIEW

After starring together in the 2019 drama The Light in Your Eyes, Han Ji-min and Nam Joo-hyuk reunite in Josée for another mournful love story (they sure do like the sad ones, these two). This 2020 film caught my eye for the promise of some lovely landscapes and a pretty pairing, but when I heard it was based on a famous Japanese short story I was all the more intrigued.

With Behind Your Touch wrapping up for Han Ji-min right now, and Nam Joo-hyuk scheduled to return to dramaland in November with Vigilante, we’re at the perfect mash-up point to delve into this big screen production and see what kind of romantic movie magic these two can ignite.

Before we go too far, I have to talk about how beautiful this movie is to look at. It’s frame after frame of stunning shots of ordinary objects followed by ordinary people. We open with a series of uninhabited spaces, moving from exteriors to interiors, where everything is a little dilapidated — a little lived in — and gives off a sense of the wear and tear that comes with living a life.

But on the flipside of that, while all the stuff we see is run down, there’s also a lot of it — we’re presented with a clash between loss and accumulation. Right away, before we meet any characters, we’re introduced to the house that will be the main setting for the story, and it’s filled to the brim with odds and ends — plastic crates, dead plants, old appliances, empty bottles, and stacks upon stacks of books. We’re quite a ways into the story by the time it becomes apparent just how important those books are.

When we meet our leads, it’s also the first time they’re meeting each other. LEE YOUNG-SEOK (Nam Joo-hyuk) is a college student who’s stopped in the road to help a woman who has fallen out of her wheelchair. The chair is broken, and Young-seok ends up borrowing a cart from a nearby shop and pulling the woman to her house — which is the one we saw in the opening sequence. There, he’s offered a meal and she sits to the side and watches him eat it.

Everything about this meeting is strange. He is cautious, she is withdrawn, and they barely exchange any words. In fact, it isn’t until a later meeting that he asks her name and we learn it’s JOSÉE (Han Ji-min). It’s even later when we find out that it’s a name she’s given to herself, based on the protagonist of a French novel.

As this tidbit comes out, along with other information, we come to realize that starting from the time they met, everything Josée has said about her life is fictional (from being born in Budapest to having traveled the world). She’s read all those books that are hoarded in the house (in a myriad of languages) and taken bits and pieces to form her own backstory. And it’s not immediately clear if she’s delusional or if she knows she’s spinning tales.

Since the story is told from Young-seok’s point of view, we get to know Josée as he does. But because he’s so concentrated on trying to figure her out, it ends up feeling like we know much more about her than him. What we do see of Young-seok is that he’s quite the playboy, slipping out of the bedrooms of multiple women (one of whom is his already partnered professor), before getting interested in Josée and continually making excuses to go to her house.

This makes the scene where he first shows a romantic interest in her (by touching her face) feel a little off-putting. Is she just another woman he’s putting the moves on? My instinct is to feel protective of her. But when he keeps coming around, trying to make her life easier (whether she wants it or not), she starts to take a liking to him too. And when she finally allows him into her life, he’s quite sincere.

The supremely slow pace of the movie quickens once they enter into a relationship together. There’s an obvious class disparity between their worlds that — visually — is huge. But it plays out in an understated way because Young-seok never makes an issue of it. He moves into her house, where she’s been living with holes in the walls, drafty windows, and a TV that gets no channels, and he begins to fix the place up for the two of them.

As the characters get closer, the film starts to distance itself from the audience even more. There’s always been a bit of a mystery about what’s true or false based on the dialogue, but for the most part, their actions have clarified what’s going on. But suddenly, we get a very symbolic scene on a Ferris wheel and then jump ahead five years where we meet the characters again. They’ve both changed, but we don’t see exactly how it happened because the missing chunk of time is never revealed.

Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that the end does feel like a bit of a punch in the chest — in a surprisingly good way — even if it’s mostly open to interpretation. The questions we’re left with when the credits roll actually helped me to like this movie better than I might have otherwise. I was finding it somewhat daunting, and the characters maybe just a little too odd, but their final scenes added a layer of complexity that had me feeling much more empathy, and also cleared up some lingering doubts even as it introduced others.

This is a strange, unclear movie where nothing is spelled out and you have to look for clues. It has a nice balance, though: the art direction and camerawork are grounded in reality and day-to-day textures, but the visuals are contrasted with fantastical elements in the storytelling. It’s fitting for a movie that’s about telling stories (some might call them lies) and how those fictions help us survive.

With arresting aesthetics and leads that aren’t afraid to appear realistically unkempt (Han Ji-min is strikingly pretty with a ruddy face and disheveled hair), this film is a nice way to spend a rainy afternoon. But if you’re the type that would rather walk off a Cliff of Doom than be left with an unresolved ending, don’t press play on this one.

Join us in October for the next K-Movie Night and let’s make a party of it! We’ll be watching Microhabitat (2018) and posting the review during the last week of the month.

Want to participate in the comments when it posts? You’ve got 3 weeks to watch! Rather wait for the review before you decide to stream it? We’ve got you covered.

 
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