ROMANCE JOE is made up of an interweaving collection of related narratives built around the suicide of a famous actress
GEMS OF KOREAN CINEMA: ROMANCE JOE (RO-MAEN-SEU-JO) (Lee Kwang-kuk, 2011)
Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick St. at Laight St.
Tuesday, September 11, free, 7:00
212-759-9550
www.koreanculture.org
www.tribecacinemas.com
Following in the footsteps of his mentor, Hong sang-soo, for whom he served as assistant director for five years, Lee Kwang-kuk’s debut film, Romance Joe, is a complex, engaging narrative about the art of storytelling. Made up of interweaving tales that eventually come together in surreal ways, mixing fantasy and reality, Romance Joe begins as an elderly mother and father (Kim Su-ung and Park Hye-jin) arrive in Seoul to surprise their son, a film director, but they are informed by his friend, Seo Dam (Kim Dong-hyeon), that he has disappeared after the suicide of a popular actress and has given up the film business. Soon Dam is telling his friend’s parents his own idea for a screenplay, about a determined young boy (Ryu Ui-hyeon) who runs away from home to find his mother at the only address he has for her, a teahouse brothel, where the owner, Re-ji (Shin Dong-mi), isn’t sure what to do with him. Meanwhile, Lee (Jo Han-cheol), a director with one hit under his belt and now facing writer’s block, has been left at a country inn without his cell phone, forced to finish his next screenplay. He orders coffee that is delivered by the movie-obsessed Re-ji, who tells him the story of Romance Joe (Kim Yeong-pil), a suicidal film director who relates a story of his own from his youth, when he (Lee David) saved a girl he loved, Cho-hee (Lee Chae-eun), after she slit her wrist in a forest. The various narratives — flashbacks, stories within stories, the modern-day framing, and script ideas — slowly merge in fascinating and confusing ways, reminiscent of such Hong films as Oki’s Movie, Like You Know It All, and Tale of Cinema. Although suicide is a major theme running through all of the stories, Romance Joe is not a sad melodrama; instead, it is an entertaining, thoughtful, if overly long exploration of narrative in film. Romance Joe, which was part of this year’s “New Directors, New Films” series at MoMA and Lincoln Center, is screening for free September 11 at Tribeca Cinemas, kicking off the Korean Cultural Service film series “Gems of Korean Cinema,” which focuses on indie works and continues September 25 with Moon Si-hyun’s Home Sweet Home and October 9 with Kim Joong-hyun’s Choked.