High infidelity
New South Korean cinema strips love and marriage bare.

By Johnny Ray Huston

'YOU ARE OUT of the picture," one half of a married couple says to the other, with satisfied finality. In fact, both halves are in the picture – one foregrounded, the other soft-focus distanced – if that picture is the final shot of Im Sang-Soo's A Good Lawyer's Wife. But only for a moment: one spouse darts freely out of and back into the camera's sight line to literally sweep away the other, who resignedly disappears through a faraway door. This last instant of fractured togetherness is a rare one in Im's film, which spends the majority of its time observing the separate and distinct dalliances of handsome attorney Young-Jak (Hwang Jung-Min) and his dancer wife, Ho-Jung (Moon So-Ri). Whether they share the same frame or not, Im's attitude toward his characters is expressed by how he looks at them, the position of the camera.

A Good Lawyer's Wife has been tagged South Korea's answer to American Beauty. Select elements – a voyeuristic adolescent neighbor, the score's initial mocking tone – warrant the comparison, but Im's film is subtler and more ruthlessly honest than Sam Mendes's smug suburban satire. The proof is in the title. While its Korean version, Baramnan Gajok, translates roughly to "A Wanton Family," A Good Lawyer's Wife fits tighter, thanks to the wry ways in which "good" truly rings false. Im observes sexuality in general, and infidelity in particular, with a matter-of-fact frankness that shames American Beauty's tame caricature of outrageousness. Capturing realities that U.S. filmmakers – trapped in discretion or airbrushed titillation – tend to ignore, his direction stays attuned to the emotions revealed by naked gestures.

Clothed or stripped, Young-Jak is ineffectual. Faced with a case involving the unearthed skeletons of Korean war victims, he practices law as if performing a role; "It's time we recover our pride!" he condescendingly lectures to the victims' families, a statement he doesn't seem to believe, though he should. Young-Jak brings his stubborn, clenched work persona home with him at night – when he comes home. Extramarital relief is another masculine right (or rite) he doesn't know quite what to do with; his younger mistress reaches orgasm by grinding against his backbone, then answers her cell phone while resting atop him as if he were a piece of furniture. Dissatisfaction flip-flops in the conjugal bed: when Young-Jak's on top of his wife, she can't wait for him to get off so she can finish herself off. "My G spot seems to be gone," she mutters as he reaches for a drink.

Her husband's lame work excuses leave Ho-Jung alone to care for her adopted, elementary school-age son. Endearing at first, their camaraderie – closer to friendship than to a parent-child dynamic – takes on troubling undertones once Ho-Jung begins her own flirtation, with a teen boy from a nearby apartment. Perhaps bound by moral or marital codes, perhaps testing rediscovered powers of attraction, Ho-Jung doesn't immediately seduce her admirer. Instead, she opts for secret dates that gradually – around the time she shares a kiss in an empty-classroom setting – reveal an urge to regress. It's an urge she ultimately seizes, and primed from her Anna Magnani-scale performance as a woman with cerebral palsy in Lee Chang-Dong's Oasis, Moon is ready for her character's catharsis.

When Ho-Jung and her teen paramour steal away to the cinema for some privacy, the scenario allows Im to both joke about and pay homage to the artistic and commercial state of South Korea's film industry (which combats Hollywood dominance via government-imposed quotas). The pair clumsily grope and fondle each other in an otherwise empty theater as a scene from Park Chan-Ok's portrait of office deceit, Jealousy Is My Middle Name, plays on-screen. A Good Lawyer's Wife and Jealousy Is My Middle Name aren't the only recent Korean films to perceptively examine romantic chains of fools (One Fine Spring Day and Turning Gate are two other notable examples), but in singling out Park's movie, Im simultaneously acknowledges a kinship – both films share a flair for symbolic literary touchstones – and points out a peak among the country's new wave of female directors.

Gina Kim's Invisible Light adds reach to this wave – it spans an ocean, to California. Split national identity is built into the structure of Kim's debut feature. The first half focuses on Gah-In, a Korean student in California: a message on Gah-In's answering machine, left by the wife of a man she's having an affair with, seems to trigger a bout of agoraphobic and anorexic despair (she never voices a word). The second half follows Do-Hee, the woman who left the message on Gah-In's machine: during a journey back to Seoul, Do-Hee searches for an answer to her own dilemma (it isn't whether or not she should leave her husband).

The man who links these two women remains unheard and unseen – out of the picture – from start to finish. The pictures Kim does present, especially during the film's Californian section, are frequently stunning. (Especially considering the film was shot for next to no money on a Sony DSR 500 Camcorder.) She magnifies the leafy-green view from a doorlike window in Gah-In's lifeless gray-white apartment, and later first gazes down on and then stares up at the choppy surface of a pool: bracingly edited, these points of view hint at Gah-In's inner conflicts and boundary issues. Ditto an uncanny sequence during the film's second half, when giraffes behind glass at a zoo seem to perform a dance for Do-Hee.

Infidelity is beside Kim's point; cheating is an ironic connecting thread, considering both women are so isolated. With one exception: the intense bond between Kim's direction and her main characters verges on symbiosis. Gah-In's chewing noises violently dominate the first half's soundtrack, just as rustling sheets practically chafe the audience's ears in Park Ki-Yong's similarly minimalist date in purgatory Camel(s). The longest take observes a binge from beginning to end; appliances and walls form monoliths around Gah-In as she near mechanically devours the contents of her churning fridge: strawberries, bread, "lo-fat" milk, carrots, and mayonnaise.

Though Do-Hee's circumstance – in particular, the quandary spawned by her response to adultery – strangely mirrors that of the wife in Im's film, Invisible Light's stasis stare-downs are less populist. (Framed prints on the walls of Gah-In's apartment offer clues to Kim's painterly approach.) The first segment evokes the domestic prison terms of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Todd Haynes's Dielman-inspired Safe. The Korean section builds to a sustained close-up of Do-Hee – the section's equivalent of Gah-In's binge – that invokes the salty-wet finale of Tsai Ming-liang's Vive l'amour. A child, a ring, these are a few of the favorite things that cause tears in Invisible Light and in Im's film. Both are true to the unfaithful.

'A Good Lawyer's Wife' plays Sat/6, 7 p.m., PFA Theater; Tues/9, 9:30 p.m., AMC Kabuki 8 Theatres. 'Invisible Light' plays Fri/5, 7 p.m., PFA Theater; Sat/6, 9:30 p.m., AMC Kabuki 8 Theatres. See box, page 32, for more festival information.