A MAN AND A WOMAN (movie review)

This movie is about two strangers who met at the school of their kids in Finland who were about to go on a camping trip with their teachers. Sang-Min (Jeon Do-Yeon) asks Ki-Hong (Gong Yoo) for a light and asked him where the camp is. Ki-Hong then volunteered to drive her there. Heavy snow forced them to spend the night at an inn where they exchanged short, awkward conversations. They have decided to take a walk the following morning and ended up in a secluded sauna where their intimacy began.

They leave the next day without knowing each other's names. Eight months later in South Korea, Ki-Hong was walking by when he saw Sang-Min fixing her window display at her boutique. It was slowly revealed that they were both married and both having significant family and marriage issues. In time, they were able to reconnect perhaps due to that common bond that they have and began a secret affair, which served as their escape from their difficulties in their family lives. The man and the woman spent nights together still to escape when the realization came that their own separate lives are falling apart. The movie ends with both Sang-Min and Ki-Hong back to the country where they first met.

This movie is so heart wrenching that i was still bawling whilst the film's closing credits are rolling. Gong-Yoo is a superb actor and you can feel and see the loneliness in his eyes when he had to make that difficult decision. The scene where he drove past her looking at the rear-view mirror with tears in his eyes as if pleading to the Gods crushed my heart. The steamy scenes were tastefully done and i was very surprised and breathless because, yeah, Gong Yoo, hello! I'm not used to seeing him in those kind of scenes so it was a shockingly yummy experience. Jeon Do-Yeon, on the other hand, was equally wonderful. You can feel her emotional pain when she realized that it was over between them. This is not a film with a happy ending but it is worth watching. So achingly beautiful, profound and compelling. I give this a 10/10.

THE NEW NORMAL

(photo grabbed from Google images) It has been 3 years since I last had an entry in this blog, and here i thought i had written something last year LOL! So, a lot of things had happened since 2018 but let me just give you the highlights: 2018 - i had surgery - a total abdominal hysterectomy with right salpingo-oophorectomy, which means they removed my uterus and cervix as well as my right ovary and fallopian tube. Basically, i have early menopause now, but there is no need to take hormone replacement therapy since i still have my left ovary. In 2019, i was hospitalized again due to abdominal pain, in which the causative factor is adhesionsdue to the surgery in 2018 (per the MD) but this is still vague. I had a nasogastric tube in me which was draining green stuff like bile, my stomach ballooned to as big as a 6-month pregnancy, and the constant vomiting, which, was the grossest because ew, i vomited a worm! In any case, a lot of my friends believed that it was due to "barang" or witchcraft, which i believed as well. The current year 2020, is a mess. We lost our mom last March (she was admitted since December 2019) due to chronic kidney disease and complications and thereafter the Covid-19 pandemic happened and is still happening. A lot of people are dying. Everybody's life turned upside down and we are all forced to adjust and adapt. Companies began to allow work-from-home setups and Zoom is being utilized for meetings, webinars, trainings, etc. People should wear masks and other protective gear and alcohol, hand sanitizers, Lysol, and whatnot became man's best friend. In addition to the pandemic, there were also a lot of natural and man-made disasters. We are only halfway through the year but we are still continuing to adapt and survive. Let us all hope and pray that the coming years are better and safer.