The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well

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Richard B A husband works too much to earn the money he needs to secure love from his lonely and unsatisfied wife. They are empty people who can't find time for intimacy, in what was Hong's contemporaneous perspective of South Korean relationships and economics in the 90s. People either lacked consistent money, to be consistently attractive, or the quantity of money required demanded too much time to allow for true intimacy. She finds escape with a writer who is working on a script while being desperate for a pay advance. He has trouble justifying his lack of success to women, due to his unpopular view of harsh reality described in his works, as well as justifying to competitors who sold out their authenticity to pander to critics. Is this about Hong himself and his struggles at the beginning of his career? The writer is also in an on-again and off-again relationship with his proofreader who has to take on many low status jobs to financially survive. She offers as much as she can to the breaking point where nothing is ever good enough for the powerful people in her life, or her schedules conflict and endanger those said jobs. Her happiness is contingent on their high standards, expectations, moods and capriciousness. People demand unyielding standards from the writer but he is also guilty of the same thing with his unyielding expectations of relationships. There's a difficulty in matching people who rate each other realistically. They have a pattern of low self-esteem, yet they behave with entitlement. Everybody suspects everybody of cheating, but in many cases they are missing pieces of the puzzle all the way to the end of the movie. The sex is less about intimacy, and more about escape or power and control, while public displays of domestic violence and rivalry are treated as commonplace and of no consequence, let alone outrage. By the end of the movie, it appears that the script talked about at the beginning, explains the ending, and a newspaper is used as a symbol for all the scandals of modern life that feature there, as well as behaving as an indictment of that world and how it's structured. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 05/03/25 Full Review Audience Member Considered one of the best Korean films in the 90s, this left me underwhelmed. The story device (apparently unrelated strands coming together at the end) which must have been novel then seems dated now. The characters are also mostly obnoxious or unsympathetic, which doesn't help the cause. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 01/30/23 Full Review Audience Member This is the directorial debut of Hong Sang-Soo. I first watched this movie in 2005 and was thoroughly impressed due to the fact I had never seen anything like it. The pacing is very slow and it's about the darker aspects of relationships - adultery, jealousy, and even murder. The main characters are intriguingly intertwined and they brush shoulders without knowing. Most people can't watch this movie, due to the cerebral nature. It's not violent, there is little action, and it requires that one pay attention. If you like little details, or the films of David Lynch, then you will like this movie. But I do want to mention that this is not as convoluted as a Lynch film; just reminiscent of his style. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/24/23 Full Review Read all reviews

The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well

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