Sang-woo is a single sound engineer living with his ill grandmother in a rural area of South Korea. A local DJ, Eun-su hires Sang-woo for a job in which she needs him to record the sounds of a bamboo forest for her radio show. They work together, slowly growing closer and eventually a relationship blossoms.
Although Hur Jin-ho takes more than a couple years between his films, there’s no reason to be complaining as his subtle, introspective melodramas are easily best ones out of Korea these days. Here, he tells a convincing tale of romance, again with such simplicity and minimalism that it appears almost effortless in the eyes of the viewer. However, we are not simply dealing with a rehash of Christmas in August. Our characters in One Fine Spring Day have a far more concrete and normal relationship and Hur succeeds fantastically in turning a story that deals with the minutest personal details of a relationship into something universal. We’ve all experienced those irrepressible moments of ecstasy, and those desperate moments of vacancy—and we relive them through our characters here.
Yu Ji-tae and Lee Young-ae make these moments real, as Hur lets them carry the film with his languid pacing and relaxed plot. The characters are the show—Yu is the more sympathetic one with a performance that flies all over the place from lazy and lovable to lost or drunk. He takes the audience on every up and down of his emotions often without any dialogue or voice-overs and just a static camera recording his every expression. Lee Young-ae plays Eun-su impressively, and authentically depicts her character’s emotional transitions with nary a contrivance.
And Hur simply takes this character drama and sets it in against beautiful nature backdrops. Kim Hyeong-gyu’s cinematography captures everything from the rich, green spring forest and the summer countryside fields to the falling snowflakes over icy winter streams. The relationship is formed in the outdoors, in those quiet moments where particular attention is paid to sound. As their relationship naturally changes, the seasons follow along, creating a contemplative and ethereal mood that only sucks us in further into their world.
Reviewed by Tarun
