The prolific Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo delivers another droll tale of romantic crisis in academia. His latest follows Sunhi, a young graduate, who inadvertently rekindles old flames on a visit back to her alma mater.
[Our Sunhi] delights as it orchestrates the seriocomic ping-ponging of a canny young woman and her three equally hapless suitors
Screened as part of NZIFF 2014
Our Sunhi 2013
U ri Sunhi
Is there, anywhere in the world, a more perceptive or droll observer of male vanity at play in academia than the prolific Korean director Hong Sang-soo? “Hong’s new comedy of manners shows three men orbiting around an elusive young woman who seems quite capable of getting ahead without much help from any of them. Sunhi is an almost-dropout in her mid-20s who decides to try for graduate school in the US. She asks Professor Choi for a reference letter but doesn’t like what it says about her personality; she appeals to him for a rethink/rewrite. Meanwhile she runs into two other guys who dote on her: her needy ex-boyfriend Munsu and her introverted college senior Jaehak, who has left his wife to live alone. Much advice flows between them all, most forcefully when drink is taken. But Hong is amused to observe how circular it all is: how platitudes get recycled from one conversation to another, and how most of it anyway falls on deaf ears.” — Tony Rayns
“Another dryly comic and acutely observed take on misread behavior, indecision and awkward interchanges between the sexes from one of cinema’s undisputed masters of moral comedy.” — Film Comment Selects