Bombam

Middle-aged Yeong-gyeong and Su-hwan meet at the wedding party of a common friend. She passes out drunk, and he carries her home on his back. Soon this becomes a daily ritual, as the two broken beings – one’s spirit consumed by alcohol and the other’s body sapped by arthritis – begin to find strength and solace in each other. Their gentle, platonic bond – outside society, outside history – offers a chance at salvation, but is severely stressed by Yeong-gyeong’s repeated relapses. Adapted from Kwon Yeo-sun’s novel of the same name, Spring Night, Kang Mi-ja’s long-awaited second feature starring the great Han Ye-ri, paints a spare, unrelenting portrait of a doomed romance between two forlorn souls cast adrift by a painful past. While borrowing elements from melodrama and fairy tale, Kang refuses to soften the blow, making us agonisingly intimate with both Yeong-gyeong’s terminal self-destruction and Su-hwan’s longing helplessness – a surprising reversal of traditional gender dynamics. Despite its raw and unremitting quality, there is great tenderness in Kang’s lyrically structured film, its nights gripped by inchoate yearning and its days suffused with the promise of renewal.