Motel Seoninjang
South Korea,
1997, 91 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
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Park Ki-yong
- prod
-
Tcha Sung-jai
- scr
-
Park Ki-yong, Bong Joon-ho
- cam
-
Christopher Doyle
- editor
-
Ham Sung-won
- cast
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Jin Hee-kyung, Jung Woo-sung, Kim Seung-hyun, Han Woong-soo, Lee Mi-yeon, Park Shin-yang
- source
-
Fortissimo Film Sales, Herenmarkt 10-2, 1013 Ed Amsterdam, Netherlands. FAX: 31-20-626-1155
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COMMENTS
Eligible for the Skyy prize. Park Ki-yong in person.
OTHER
Motel Cactus chronicles the loves of four motel patrons at four different times of the year. Each episode profiles a relationship at a different stage of growth or disintegration. Using a single motel room as a metaphor for the transiency of emotions, Park Ki-yong’s feature debut offers a mesmerizing yet devastating portrait of the fragility of human love. “Summer,” the first episode, follows Hyun-ju on her birthday. Sentimental about celebrating the occasion here with her lover Min-gu, Hyun-ju discovers that Min-gu regards her affection as a burden. “Spring” tells of two film students, Jun-ki and Seo-kyung, whose unplanned sex disrupts their relationship. In “Fall,” the nostalgia-plagued Hyun-ju returns to the motel where she has a meaningless sexual encounter with a stranger. In the final episode, “Winter,” Suk-tae brings his old lover, Hee-su, to the motel for a reconciliation attempt that fails. To all the lovers who rent the room, the motel is a place for instant consumption and pleasure, but it also intensifies their loneliness and longing. Shot in luminous primary colors by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Motel Cactus powerfully conveys both the ecstasies and the anguish of those who pass through and, under Park Ki-yong’s skillful direction, presents a world in which lives converge for fleeting moments only to leave behind painful memories.
—Lisanne Skyler
FACTOID #25
The San Francisco International showed Lina Wertm’ller’s first film, The Lizards, in 1963. A favorite of Bay Area audiences, her features All Screwed Up and The Seduction of Mimi had their U.S. premieres at the SFIFF in 1972 and 1974.
