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.