April Snow [외출]

Synopsis

Directed
by Heo Jin-Ho, “April Snow” is not your conventional romance, nor is it
much of a melodrama. Whilst in the middle of setting up the lighting
for a concert in Seoul, In-Su is called away to the emergency room of a
small town where his wife Su-Jin is undergoing surgery. As he soon
discovers, she was not alone in the car when it crashed, and she was
not, as she’d told him, away on business. His wife’s affair is made
agonisingly plain as he and the wife of her lover sort through their
spouses’ belongings. Both accident victims end up in lengthy comas and
our leads are forced to rent hotel rooms, play caretaker, and wait.

Seo-Young
is a housewife and In-Su a lighting engineer. These two ordinary people
are suddenly thrown into a situation for which they have no resources
to deal with. In-Su’s father-in-law comes to visit the hospital, they
eat together saying little. The scene is thick with tension and you
know In-Su is thinking how he can’t possibly share his grief with this
man. Meanwhile Seo-Young is completely isolated, no other family or
friends come to visit and she spends her evenings drinking alone in her
hotel room. Standing at her window one night she witnesses In-Su
throwing snowballs against the side of the building next door and goes
down to join him. The two develop an awkward friendship, joined by a
common tragedy and secrets they can barely talk about. Then, like
Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Wong Kar-Wai’s “In the Mood for Love”,
they tentatively begin an affair of their own.

edited by jiejunwoo

Review

Die-hard
Bae Yong-Jun fans and anyone familiar with Heo Jin-Ho’s work on
“Christmas in August” and “One Fine Spring Day” will probably find this
outing enjoyable. The rest may very well be bored. Like both previous
films, there are really only two characters, and the fact he can make
an almost 2-hour film this way sometimes amazes me. His pacing may be
slow at times, but the raw emotion he draws from his actors is to be
applauded. There’s no melodrama here, just real life pain. As I
watched, I couldn’t help but feel every emotion the characters must be
feeling, all the frustration and confusion. Both actors carry their
roles beautifully.

After
they’ve become more involved, Seo-Young says to him “I must be losing
my mind… what’s going to become of us?” a question I kept wondering
to myself. Apparently snowfall in April is rare in Korea, thus the
significance of the title. Can a relationship that began the way theirs
did last? Is it even realistic to expect it to?

Would
there be some lame melodramatic twist that would ruin the whole film?
Would someone get hit by a truck? Or lose their memory? Or develop a
brain tumour?

Thankfully, none of the above. Highly recommended.

edited by jiejunwoo

Related links:

Global YesAsia

YesAsia

Tiger Cinema