Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

Hong Sangsoo’s The Day a Pig Fell into a Well 205co-workers from the theater, who has followed her, observes this from adistance. He follows Minjae to a restaurant where he strikes up a conversationwith her. Eventually the pair winds up in bed.The fourth part begins in yet another morning as Bokyung, apparentlyhaving planned to go away with Hyosup, waits for him in a bus station.When he doesn’t arrive, she leaves a message on his answering machinesaying she’ll wait for him for another 30 minutes. When he still doesn’tappear, she goes to Hyosup’s apartment, leaving a note wedged into thedoor when there is no response to her knock. After she leaves, Hyosup’sneighbor takes note and reads it in her apartment. While sitting in a restaurantlater in the day, Bokyung sees her husband walk by. She follows himto a clinic and tries to find out what he is being treated for. Then, afterriding aimlessly on a city bus, she stops at a relative’s shop where she naps,dreaming about how the people she knows act at her funeral. After leavingthe shop, she stops at a photographer’s studio where she insists uponbuying, and then destroying, a formal portrait of her husband and herselfwith a small child. Still later, she returns to Hyosup’s apartment, but againreceives no reply. She sees that the note she left is gone and walks away.(We then see what she cannot see in the apartment: Minsu has killed Minjaeand Hyosup.) In bed at home later that night, Bokyung struggles brieflybefore allowing Dongwoo to force himself sexually upon her. After herhusband has gone out for cigarettes, Bokyung leaves another message onHyosup’s answering machine. The next morning, after reading the newspaper,Bokyung seems to be about to commit suicide, though we can’t besure because the shot of her on the verge of committing suicide – and thefilm itself – end abruptly.The Day a Pig Fell into a Well is a striking departure in subject matterfrom what had been the norm for nearly a decade in the films knowncollectively as New Korean Cinema. As Jinhee Kim explains,The years between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s—a period marked byintense political upheavals and carefully measured cultural oppression—arenow commonly referred to as the period of the New Korean Cinema. Thebulk of films produced during this period are dependent on social contextfor the development of their plot, characters, and themes. Many proponentsof this artistic movement saw film as a social institution that is obligedto portray the political realities of the marginalized classes such as factoryworkers, prostitutes, anti-government resistants, and persons from otherneglected corners of society. (Kim 2002, pp. 11–12)