Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors photo: Miracin Films The Next Director: Hong Sang-Soo October 30 through November 2 BAMcinématek more film most popular most commented Questions for Michael Patrick King, Sex and the City Writer and Director by Lynn Yaeger Savage Grace Tracking Shots by Jim Ridley Bigger, Stronger, Faster*: Roid Documentary Tracking Shots by Michelle Orange Vivre sa vie Tracking Shots by Nick Pinkerton The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta) Tracking Shots by Ella Taylor Trash Your Rated-X Salvation, Glamdammit by Nate 'Igor' Smith Choice Cunts: This Time With Naked Sushi by Maro Sex and the City by Ella Taylor I'd Rather Masturbate Than Have Sex With My Girlfriend. Yup. Savage Love by Dan Savage A Slice of Mafia With Your Sparkling Water? by Tom Robbins Indiana Jones and the Fortress of Sad Decline (10) Robert Wilonsky Sex and the City: Sex and the City (7) Ella Taylor Jason Beghe Turned Away at NY Scientology Building (7) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: Lower East Side Rezone Sparks Border War in Chinatown (7) Runnin' Scared: Maria Luisa Tucker There Goes the Bowery. . . Again (5) Lynn Yaeger

In 2000's Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Hong's first comedy—an ultradark Annie Hall about a rich art dealer, a failed filmmaker, and the woman they both want to bed—plays shot/reverse-shot ping-pong not from image to image, but across the film's entire duration: Its first half sets up one version of a broken love story, then uses the second half to retell the first, subtly reversing the camera's view of events as well as the narrative's original angles of intention, and rescinding the veracity of events we'd initially been coaxed to trust. Every new elaboration on an incident destabilizes the one before: Funny bits are reimagined as awful failings, simplicity isn't so much erased as scribbled over into convolution, and the more characters seem to come together, the more atomized their souls become.

Hong's anomie-steeped debut, 1997's The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, concerns the unraveling of four loosely intertwined lives in late-20th-century Seoul—a hack writer, a movie-house ticket-taker, a water-purifier salesman, and his lonely wife—whose lives intersect at inopportune moments. Co-scripted with four of his former students (and titled after a John Cheever story), the film has a sense of urban isolation that owes a little to early films of Taiwan's Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, though Hong claims his main inspirations were Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest and one of the Lumière brothers' documentary actualitiés of turn-of-the-century dockworkers. Hong came fully into his own with the masterful The Power of Kangwon Province (1998), in which a young professor and his younger former student/lover make separate desultory pilgrimages to the titular vacation spot—a woodsy mountain range filled with shady paths, lonely waterfalls, and threatening cliffs—over the course of the same sad weekend, yet never catch so much as a glimpse of one another. Back in Seoul, the miserable lovers reunite, but the force of the film isn't so much in their final clinch as in all the strange details that characterize their weekend away: a fish mysteriously flopping about on a remote mountain trail far from any stream, an ill-fated minor character who floats past both protagonists like a noonday ghost, the sobs of a lovelorn policeman, hanging from a balcony, too drunk to fall or fly.

Gorgeously photographed and filled with startlingly fresh performances (Kangwon's Oh Yun-Hong, a sylph with the shape of a sea fluke and eyelids like swollen cotton sops, and Virgin's Lee Eun-Joo, a model of irritating desirability to rank with Breton's Nadja, are both standouts), Hong's films are also peppered with sly bits of cinephilia (the poster for The Untouchables in Virgin is a wry touch). But while the director's modern mannerisms and multiple film-fest awards clearly tickle international critics, his films are every bit as Korea-specific as anything by culture-curator and Chunhyang director Im Kwon-taek. Brilliantly bifurcated and deeply suspicious of reunifications of any sort, Hong's films aren't just mounting portraits of broken lovers; they're exploring the most difficult regions of his politically and geographically fractured nation's historically broken heart.