The story is straightforward: A Korean woman, married to an American, reconnects with a childhood friend after many years. The friend has seemingly harboured feelings for her over the years and makes the trip from Seoul to New York and meets her. What did he seek/expect? Is she drawn to her old friend? Will the husband come off well or second best? Can the marriage survive when memories and old embers of attraction continue to smoulder?

The context is laid out in bare terms, with no more than a few frames to mark the passage of time and the evolution of the immigrant Korean as a playwright in America, while the childhood friend, left behind in Seoul, becomes an engineer after a stint in the military.

Focusing on the relationship dynamic between two people who connect after having been separated by time and space, a third individual, the American husband, enters to set up a tangle, sorry, a triangle. The film seems to tell a story within a bubble of sorts, intensifying the drama of the threesome by keeping out any other elements of the immigrant experience, family ties and politics. One may argue that what emerges is an intensely focused study, devoid of layers and shades that all human experience comes with. Character development is limited but the actors more than make up for it with a stellar performance.

Given limited dialogue, the story is told with an unhurried pace, lingering visuals and an unobtrusive score, as if allowing time to write the script in our minds as the scenes unfold. The tone is soft and devoid of any melodrama, the emotionality of moments is heightened by silences, expressions and the sparse words exchanged. The storytelling moves along gently against the backdrop of blue–grey skies, slow walks, and the steady pace of the ferry as it moves past the New York skyline.  

Our man in Seoul is vulnerable, sentimental and hopeful, nursing an image of a young girl he once knew, wrestling with the odds that a cherished fondness will somehow transform into a viable relationship. The ache, anticipation and awkwardness of the moment he meets his childhood sweetheart after many years is poignant. The need to connect, to engage, to travel on the nostalgia train, to speak of unexpressed yearning, to be affirmed of worthiness in her eyes—to confirm that she is happy, to learn with finality that her world is in New York and in another man’s arms, that his hopes for her love must not suffer from a lack of effort. Much happens with few words.

Acceptance is to arrive at an inner reconciliation of one’s impossible desire with the unpalatable but irrefutable truth of the other’s reality and dreams—an acceptance that is silently tearful, yet strong, and full of blessing, even as one exits the stage, just as we would expect of our man from Seoul.

The husband quite brilliantly portrays the insecurities of a man who is suddenly stricken by doubt about whether his has just been a (relationship and) marriage of convenience, wondering if it can withstand being pitted against his wife’s relationship with an old friend. One wonders if men are intrinsically possessive and prone to jealousies and insecurities in relationships. Is there an assumption that relationships are essentially zero-sum equations? Haven’t women been paying a price by constantly reassuring their men, and curbing their own needs and desires for connection, among other things?

This also leads me to think that intimacy is not finite and confined, of one colour that is uniform in its evocations and contents. The nature of intimacy, the space it creates and what it allows varies across relationships and perhaps across different encounters with the same person. One can be truly open only if one feels secure. It is possible to feel secure only if one accepts that one cannot be the sole claimant to all intimacies or the only being unto whom the totality of who the other is and was must merge.

The woman is sensitive and pragmatic, aware of a world she left behind but not steeped in nostalgia, wistful about lost connections but very present to her immediate world. She is very aware of the Korean blood in her veins and the Korean tongue, but also of the new world she inhabits, with its ebb and flow of opportunities. Little is known of what her transplant to new shores meant to her process of growing up, except hints of her feeling like an outsider, her industrious nature and focus on her passion. Parents fade away after an early appearance except for the rare mention that suggests they were warm to having an American son-in-law.  

Of the three, the woman emerges the strongest, the most secure and willing to do what it takes to honour her relationships and pursue her chosen career. She comes through as clear-headed, and not caught with doubts or dilemmas that invariably bring on stresses and guilt-laden choices. There is the occasional hint of loneliness, surrounded as she is by people from an ‘alien’ world but it is remarkable that she remains uncomplaining throughout.

Ultimately, what is striking is the limited range of emotions that the movie allows for. No displays of anger, no recourse to humour, no shows of valour … nothing remotely loud or exuberant. As we see off our man from Seoul, one leaves the movie theatre mellow and mute into the rush of people, the abounding colours, the cacophony on the streets, the smells from roadside food stalls, the stench of open drains and the dreary wait for a cab late at night.