Christmas in August

Jung-won runs a small photography shop. He takes passport pictures, enlarges old photographs, prepares portraits for funerals. He knows he is ill and tells nobody; he writes down for his father how the video player works, shows his sister where things are kept. One day Da-rim comes to the shop. She writes parking tickets for the council and calls in often to have her films developed. They talk. They eat ice cream. Da-rim is drawn to him and meets a distance she cannot account for. Hur Jin-ho directs; it is his first film. Han Suk-kyu plays Jung-won and Shim Eun-ha plays Da-rim; Shin Gu is in the cast. It is a South Korean production, made in 1998. Its starting point is the story of a real photographer; the director began from that man's early death. The shop is not a set; the crew arranged and used an actual shop in a small town. The narrative never discusses the illness; there is no scene of diagnosis, the hospital section is short and nobody weeps. The matter it treats is preparing to leave; Jung-won is thinking not about dying but about the work he will leave behind. The camera is mostly fixed and the scenes are held long; the narrative moves through looks. The film is counted among the early works of the Korean new wave and influenced the melodramas that followed. The photograph at the end gathers the whole feeling of the film into one frame. Its limit is pace; the narrative is very slow, there is little event, and the feeling is held down. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean cinema and quiet melodrama. Who it is not for: it is very slow, uneventful, and the ending sad.