After returning to Korea from France, R is reunited with J, his lover in Paris. As J refuses to have sex with R, he gets mad and goes to Daegu to meet his wife and children. However, his troubled mind is obsessed with J. Whenever he visits Seoul, he meets her, but she refuses to sleep with him, saying they are no longer in Paris.

* Source: Korean Film Archive

This film is very meaningful for director Jang Sunwoo, Taehung Pictures, and the Korean film industry. Since A Short Love Affair (1990) where Jang has compassionately studied the daily lives of marginalized people, he started observing people’s daily lives. In this film, he depicts in detail the weak morals of the intellectuals based on the postmodernist novel by Ha Ilji. It starts with a man entering the country at the airport with the narration by the director saying “R came back.” It applies a third-person viewpoint adding to the camera’s angle to experiment with the director’s “subjective objectiveness.” The last scene where R sees the landscape with country women from a bus and spills milk is still weighty. It had drawn almost 180,000 viewers only at Dansungsa in December 1991 when it was released. The film also was awarded various prizes and it proves that Lee Taewon was right once again. [CHUNG Chonghwa]