Synching Blue

(South Korea, 2007, 108 mins)

HDCam

Canadian Premiere

PRODS: Sarah Wylie Ammerman, Hou Ling Ming
SCR/CAM/ED: Seo Won-Tae
MUS: Tchaikovsky
Cast: David Yun, Betsy McCall, Arwen King, Chris Kennedy, Sherill Lawrence, Shalo Penuela

Dragons & Tigers Award Nominee.

Is there a link between masturbation and synchronized swimming? Is there a link between a failure to connect with other living people and the plight of the homeless? Is there an interface between a broken domestic washing machine and a public launderette with a view? The first Dragons & Tigers Award nominee since Oxhide to be shot in the CinemaScope format wordlessly poses these and several other urgent questions. A Korean man living in a large (and largely empty) San Francisco apartment spends most of his time masturbating; like all obsessive-compulsives, he finds it harder and harder to get excited. A woman works as a pool attendant and life guard; she lives alone in a small, homely apartment and practices yoga. The pool is used for practice by a synchronized swimming team. A faulty washing machine sends the man on one of his rare forays into the outside world, in search of a launderette. He meets the woman. A tentative connection is made through a near-drowning accident, but will it lead to actual intimacy?

Seo Won-Tae, who is studying in California, has made a series of excellent formalist shorts on such subjects as the colonial heritage in Korean architecture and the status of an ageing power-plant as a national monument. This debut feature could also be called formalist, but its engagement with human emotional blockages and the psychology of voyeurism is acute and very witty. In tone, we’re not that far from early Atom Egoyan. In style, we might be somewhere entirely new.

-- Tony Rayns

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