CAFÉ NOIR is an unusual and exhilarating cinematic experience
THE HIDDEN GEMS OF INDIE CINEMA: CAFÉ NOIR (KAPE NEUWAREU) (Jung Sung-il, 2010)
Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick St. at Laight St.
Tuesday, June 21, free, 6:30
Series runs every other Tuesday through June 21
212-759-9550
www.subwaycinema.com
www.tribecacinemas.com
Longtime Korean film critic Jung Sung-il makes a sparkling debut as writer-director with the masterful Café Noir. Inspired by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Dostoevsky’s White Nights, Jung has created a visually stunning three-hour epic of unrequited and lost love. Shin Ha-gyun stars as Young-soo, a teacher who falls in love with the married Mee-yeon (Moon Jeong-hee), the mother of one of his students. But when Mee-yeon’s husband returns after an extended business leave, she wants to end the affair, but Young-soo has different, far more devious plans. In the second half of the film, Young-soo protects a stranger, Sun-hwa (Jung Yu-mi), from a stalker and becomes obsessed with her story of waiting by the river for a man who had stayed at her grandmother’s hotel where she works. Meanwhile, another woman named Mee-yeon (Kim Hye-na), who delivers relationship-ending packages, enters Young-soo’s life as well, taking him for a liberating ride on her motorcycle. Jung and cinematographer Kim Jun-young go from color to black and white in Café Noir, creating deeply atmospheric scenes interspersed with long, extended shots of numerous locations in Seoul, from Namsan and Sung-Buk-Dong to Cheonggye Stream and Han River. Jung fills the poetic film with direct and indirect nods to such Korean directors as Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Hong Sang-soo, and Kim Ki-duk as he tells his offbeat, unusual tale. “I, along with my camera, my crew and cast, wandered around in Seoul,” Jung explains in his director’s note. “The movie’s ‘dead time’ is the real time of Korea, the time in which our despair dwells. Goethe, Frankfurt 1774. Dostoevsky, St. Petersburg 1848. Seoul, 2009. Dead times. No more deaths.” As dark as that sounds, Café Noir is an exhilarating cinematic experience. Café Noir is screening June 21 at 7:00, concluding the latest, and free, Korean Movie Night series at Tribeca Cinemas, “The Hidden Gems of Indie Cinema,” focusing on smaller, independent films from South Korea.