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Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

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Note: Cantonese with English subtitles.

Judging by the title of this rather obscure little Asian film you are led to expect something entirely different than what is actually presented on the screen. Who wouldn't expect something highly pornographic in nature when they read the title `Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors.' It turns out to be nothing of the kind.

What you find yourself watching instead is a slow moving study in existential longing and alienation presented in a manner that Ingmar Bergman would be proud of. The film is shot in black and white, the season is winter. The trees are barren of foliage, the lake in the park frozen and the sky overcast and gloomy. The mood and atmosphere is so stark and minimal you almost expect to see Sven Nykvists' name in the closing credits.

Synopsis: Two attractive young people meet through a mutual acquaintance and begin a tentative friend which slowly evolves into a meaningful relationship. The tale is told twice, first from the male perspective, then the female. This is definitely a love story of the mundane kind. It contains no exhilarating expressions of love or carefree emotional outbursts. The only brief moment of openly affectionate behavior between the two would-be lovers comes late in the film, finally adding a brief but positive and uplifting note to an otherwise dreary relationship.

It took me awhile to figure it out the filmmakers intent, but I think I finally did. The message of the film is found in the cinematic mood, not the dialogue. The mood is the message. From a personal perspective two hours and six minutes is an awfully long time to simply bask in the atmosphere of a movie, but maybe that's just a product of my American perspective. If not for the presence of the alluring beauty Eun-ju Lee as the female love interest I would've never lasted to the end.

Virgin is a movie about a 7 day love triangle, with the story constructed twice based on two memories. It's only the second film of actress Eun-ju Lee, who plays Soo-jung. On IMDB the B&W is reported as "striking", "radiant" and "gorgeous" but my copy (shown), the North American distribution DVD, is none of those. The B&W is elsewhere reported as "wonderfully grainy" and that seems to fit what I see. I liked this movie, the slow careful pace of it.

The DaDa-ist artist Marcel Duchamp created a conglomeration of performance/painted/sculpted art ideas and notions from 1912 or so through 1923. Duchamp called it "The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even)" as he explored anti-art. He considered himself a Dadaist well into the '40s.

The film "Virgin Stripped Bare" reflects back to Duchamp's famous artwork. Duchamp's realized piece is a free-standing painting on glass. Cracked glass. It was painted in part with wire and dust.

While creating "Virgin" Duchamp also wrote notes and scraps and jottings and in the '30s published the collected loose clippings as "The Green Box", a kind of catalogue of his ideas. "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" seems to re-organize space between the woman and her men, and the relationship between them, and the emotions of both the human "blossom" and a mechanical engine, or a "mass produced readymade." In Duchamp's mind the glass painting illustrated his Box.

A review of "The Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors" at Koreanfilm calls writer/director Hong Sang-soo "the strongest and most cerebral of contemporary Korean filmmakers." We can watch this movie of the fragile Euh-ju Lee and her two men as they miss connections, spin around each other, approach truth yet not reach it. As I noted, it is filmed in black and white. The story is told 2 and 3 times.

Perhaps we have insight to the film from the Duchamp painting, and with its lost, icy Green Box notion of "love gasoline" and its "pendu femelle" and its "cinematic effects of the electrical stripping." In 1970 art-historian Lucy Lippard, in Dadas on Art: Tzara, Arp, Duchamp and Others described "Bride" as "a pessimistic and ultimately nonerotic view of the act of love reduced to a function of entirely detached machines."

Non-erotic? Ummm, maybe, but maybe erotic and playful in its way. Darcy Paquet writes at Koreanfilm that the Korean title, "Oh! Soojung" works both as a pun on a common Korean name and as a sexually-tinged reference: 'Soojung' means 'fertilization.' The film is Recommended.