That there is no straightforward way to address sexual assault may be the core message of Journey to Face Them, the debut feature of Hwang In-won. The film follows a romance novelist, from the moment she deploys an app to meet a potential lover on the street, to a surrealistic psychological reckoning in her apartment much later.
Between these events, Su-yeon, our heroine, has her story told through a series of engagements that are not quite linear and not quite chronological.
The pivotal experience for her comes when a former classmate and lover, Jeong-ahn, invites her to take part in lodging a complaint against one of their teachers, Professor Shin, from back in the day. “You know how he committed sexual violence on his students,” she is told.
Apparently, the professor also took his actions outside of school into the literary world and karma, it seems, is about to catch up with him. Will Su-yeon (Seok-hee) be willing to join the group in bringing this bad man to book?
“I just slept with him once,” she says, as though it excuses her from getting involved. As you can imagine, it’s not quite what her companion expects as a response. The next morning, news of what transpired between the professor and his students is on television. It’s big news. Su-yeon turns off the TV.
Does she feel guilty for not considering her experience with the professor harmful? Or is she lying to herself about the harm she suffered? An answer isn’t provided. Not directly, at least.
What answer there is comes when Su-yeon receives feedback from a publisher concerning her work. She seems to be anti-romance, which is not quite compatible with being a romance novelist. Her protagonist, she is told, treats other characters in a way that’s “devoid of love” and her “characters seem to lack charming qualities”. Her work has obscenity but no romance.
It is a clever way to answer the central question about Su-yeon’s past, as the event is itself never really shown, although we do get a flashback in which the young Su-yeon looks to be a minor. In other words, too young to consent.
This indirect treatment of the aftermath of sexual assault is carried through the film’s lean 62 minutes’ runtime, as we see Su-yeon and a staffer at her publishing house feel their way through a weirdly undefined relationship. Is the weirdness linked to that affair with Professor Shin? Again, there is no direct answer. But the nature of the film’s storytelling — its focus on the women afflicted by the professor’s actions, rather than the man himself — encourages one to make that connection.
Korean cinema has long had filmmakers in thrall of the understated — a group sometimes separate from and sometimes the same as those who are big-time purveyors of graphic violence. There will, for example, probably always be some forum online for those who debate just what exactly happened in Lee Chang Dong’s Burning, a film that famously sealed its story with one very violent episode as a kind of catharsis. Journey To Face Them has no such thing; the closest it comes to violence is the ejection of a horny, humiliated lover-boy from a vehicle. To close her picture, Hwang goes instead for the sort of catharsis that is almost a cliché in arthouse pictures, the type that involves the closeup or medium shot of a character framed as though on the cusp of an epiphany, or in its wake. This familiarity doesn’t detract from the film’s positives — its performances, the confident camerawork, its poetic, meditative quality — but it does feel a bit too easy to end this story on an ambiguous note.
Hwang hasn’t made a classic. Her film is nonetheless very good. It will find grateful audiences wherever women and men engage in the complex game of love, sex, and all of their attendant mess. They’ll just have to come to their own conclusions about Su-yeon’s actions and inactions.
Director, screenplay, editing: Hwang In-won
Cast: Seok-hee, Seung-yeon Lee, See-eun Kim, Sol-hae Kim Woo-young Bahk
Cinematography: Min-ju Kim
Sound: Enoch Park
Producer: Eun-joung Park
Production companies: DGC, Tiger Cinema
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Korean Cinema Today, Vision)
In Korean
62 minutes