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Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Festival film review: Love And…

Tony Rayns, Zhang Lu, Moon Sori and Rho Seh-hyun after the screening of Love And...
Tony Rayns, Zhang Lu, Moon Sori and Rho Seh-hyun after the screening of Love And…

Two years ago the revered Korean film critic Tony Rayns asked Moon Sori an awkward question. The question was followed by a sharp intake of breath from the audience who couldn’t believe what they had just heard, and by a few false starts at a response by Ms Moon before she answered fluently.

At the final Q+A of the 2015 London Korean Film Festival he asked an equally awkward question. But this time it was one which many in the audience were dying to ask for themselves.

We had all just sat through Zhang Lu’s latest low-budget feature known in English as Love And… And we were all wondering what on earth it was that we had just seen.

Rayns’s question of the star actress: “Did you ‘get it’?” To translate – did you understand what the blazes it was all about? Ms Moon, having traveled from Korea probably knowing that she was going to be asked this very question (after all, other than the question “how did director Zhang persuade you to take the part of a janitor?” it was the only possible question to ask) did not falter.

I can’t remember what she said, because it’s the sort of film which not many people will ‘get’. But it was something along the lines that while it might not have been obvious from the script, which was minimal, when she saw the final film she understood the director’s intentions.

If so, she did better than most of the audience.

Three days of filming with the actors, followed by a couple of extra days shooting padding it out in the hospital location, resulted in what felt like a couple of minutes’ screen time for each of the actors followed by an interminable age of jerky footage shot in hospital corridors.

It was a brave ending to the 2015 LKFF, and it was fantastic that director Zhang and Ms Moon came to London to answer questions. Thanks once again to the KCC for their adventurous programming.

Zhang Lu (장률 / 張律): Love And… (필름시대사랑, 2015) score-2score-0score-0score-0score-0

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