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2001｜113 MIN | Drama

DIRECTOR HUR Jin-ho

CAST YOO Ji-tae, LEE Young-ae

RELEASE DATE September 28, 2001

CONTACT Cinema Service

Tel : +82 2 2001 8800

Fax : +82 2 2001 8899

Email : egle5@cinemaservice.com

Following his hit melodrama Christmas in August, released in 1998, director HUR Jin-ho returned with an equally memorable and subtle tale of love with One Fine Spring Day (2001). Featuring the star power of LEE Young-ae and at the time rising star YOO Ji-tae, the film uses the sounds and seasons of nature, to express the unutterable vacillations of a fragile human relationship.  

Sang-woo, a Seoul-based sound recordist who lives with his father, aunt and grandmother who suffers from Alzheimer’s, travels East to Gangneung for a job. There he meets Eun-soo, a radio station announcer and producer who wants to record the sounds of nature. Together, they draw close during the winter, but as the seasons pass, things become more complicated. Ultimately their personal needs and desires pull them apart.

HUR’s narrative focus in his sophomore work is more general than his debut, but its simple appearance is infused with a novel approach to sound to draw us into the tale’s universal themes. Through the professions of the lead characters, who remain silent as they record the sounds of nature around them, the audience is also invited to appreciate the details of the events that unfold on screen. Combined with still camerawork, which favors subtle but striking compositions (courtesy of longtime Hong Sangsoo cinematographer KIM Hyeong-gu), not to mention beautiful locations that foreground some unique aspects of the Korean landscape, One Fine Spring Day is an unusually perspicacious romantic drama.

A year after his romantic turn in the time slip drama Ditto (2000), rising star YOO Ji-tae brought a stolid charm to Sang-woo, playing him as a sensitive yet easy-going character. LEE Young-ae, known to foreign viewers for her lead role in PARK Chan-wook’s (Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, 2005), plays an unusually head-strong and independent female protagonists at this early of the development of modern Korean film. Her character Eun-soo is the one who instigates the sexual relationship between herself and Sang-woo, when she invites him over with the offer ‘do you want to eat some ramen?’, a phrase that entered Korean pop culture and has since become synonymous with a proposition.

Carefully observed and emotionally resonant, One Fine Spring Day proved that director HUR’s focused introspection and intimate sensibility were no fluke and he has continued ever since as one of the foremost purveyor of serious drama in the Korean market.