Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013)

The eponymous girl (Jung Eun-chae) is struggling to come to terms with her mother's imminent emigration to Canada. The day before her departure, the pair meet to spend the day together and when they part, the daughter starts to pine a little. She decides that she wants to meet her former (married) university professor "Seongjun" (Lee Sun-kyun) with whom she'd had clandestine affair and their meeting starts to make both realise what they had, miss and want for their respective - or maybe even conjoined - futures. It's all perfectly watchable but the story is as old as the hills, neither the acting nor the writing really set the thing alight and by midway through I wasn't quite sure whether I cared enough about either of them to worry about the morality of a relationship between a teaching professional and his impressionable student. It's a melodrama-cum-soap opera that does come, slightly, to an head when the couple disclose their former relationship to her friends and to her only other sexual partner but even then, I'm not sure how convinced I was by their responses and attitudes. It's not that I'm being prudish about their sex lives, it's just that I found neither character remotely engaging. The whole premiss might be supposed to be allegorical about the state of Korean nationhood and/or of reconciling their past and the present but it's the sheer banality of the thing that renders it impotent and any development of her troubled, self-obsessed, character is largely left on the sidelines.

Apr 11, 2024