South Korea,
1986, 100 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
-
Im Kwon-taek
- prod
-
Jin Sung-man
- scr
-
Song Kil-han
- cam
-
Gu Jung-mo
- editor
-
Park Sun-dok
- cast
-
Kim Ji-mi, Jun Seiyoung, Ahn Soyoung, Lee Hye-young, Myoung Hee, Park Kunhyoung, Choi Dong-joon
- source
-
Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation, 206-46 Changny ongni-Dong, Tongdaemun-gu, Seoul, South Korea. FAX: 82-2-9587-550
-
COMMENTS
Im Kwon-taek appeared in person to receive the Akira Kurosawa Award.
OTHER
Im Kwon-taek commented in the documentary Cinema on the Road (made for the BFI’s “Century of Cinema” series) that Ticket represented a type of “social protest” filmmaking he had left behind, but the film’s skillful blend of social realism, metaphor and heightened drama seems in many ways central to his style. It’s a film in the vein of Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame, an account of four women working as prostitutes from a snack bar in an unnamed port. The eponymous tickets are “bar fines” which the women must pay to their employer whenever they go out to “deliver an order.” Madam Min (veteran star Kim Ji-mi at her career best), married to a political prisoner, runs the Jyo Hyang Teahouse with an iron fist: she has tough house rules about behavior and dress and doesn’t extend credit to her staff. The women who work for her are all trying to support relatives or lovers; all of them are subject to abuse from men and most of them suffer crushing emotional disappointments. The focus is on Min herself, who discovers that her husband has left jail and married someone richer, and the teenaged Sei-young, who works to send her ungrateful fiancé through college. It’s easy to see why Korean audiences found it shocking in 1986, but it works now as an intimate and poignant portrait of a group of women.
—Tony Rayns
FACTOID #68
Stanley Mosk, who later became a California state Supreme Court Justice, served as the general chairman at the 1967 Festival.
