Hong Sang-soo’s third film marks the point at which the filmmaker cemented his signature style and pet themes in earnest. Where his earlier features exhibited his interest in bifurcating narrative lines, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors shows how quietly subversive he could be. For the first time in his career, he experiments with perspective shifts that not only upend our preconceptions of what’s come before but are alive with an infinite kind of possibility with regard to what’s to come.
Two friends, TV producer Young-soo (Moon Sung-keun) and wealthy artist Jae-hoon (Jeong Bo-seok), are wooing the same woman, Young-soo’s colleague Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju). The first half of the film follows the handsome, suave Jae-hoon as he pursues Soo-jung with presumptuous imperiousness, kissing her without her consent on a first date and openly asking her to be his lover. But when Virgin Stripped Bare shifts to follow the nerdy, shy Young-soo, we see that his approach proves no more hospitable to his evidently self-reliant crush. Of course, it doesn’t help Young-soo’s game that he’s prone to subtle methods of manipulation.
Many a future Hong film depicts the obliviousness of such men in seriocomic fashion, but Young-soo and Jae-hoon exude a predatory menace. All the while, Soo-jung remains an almost muted presence in the frame, often de-escalating tense situations and only raising her voice right at the moment before one of the men is about to take things too far. And that she displays mostly the same behavior toward Young-soo and Jae-hoon is both damning of the men and the very social mores that empower them. Despite Jae-hoon and Young-soo’s polar personalities, they treat her fundamentally the same, and beneath her seemingly demure exterior is a honed defensiveness against their mutual predations.
Virgin Stripped Bare is also the film where Hong began to use transparently manipulated variations of his repetitions, along with aesthetic aspects—black-and-white photography, title cards, and a score that sounds better suited to the silent era than a modern, talky dramedy—to both call attention to and undermine the artifice of his methods. Hong’s deceptively minimalist approach has consistently probed at the edges between the diegetic reality of his stories and the metatextual awareness of that reality, but to date, Virgin Stripped Bare may represent his most blunt précis of his still-evolving methods.
Image/Sound
Grasshopper’s transfer stresses the velvety texture of the film’s monochrome cinematography. There are some issues with image stability that appear mostly inherent to the original negative, from some shadowy scenes that hinder object definition to exteriors that look blown out by natural light. For the most part, however, detail is clear, with subtle gray levels and clothing textures visible even in long shot. The lossless 5.1 track gently weaves ambient effects in the side channels while the dialogue enjoys firm center placement.
Extras
Grasshopper’s disc comes with no extras.
Overall
Hong Sang-soo’s brilliantly bleak third film announced the arrival of a master.
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