Burning

Watch The Trailer

Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Jong-su is a young aspiring fiction writer from a lower-class rural background.  When we first meet him, he's leading a hand-to-mouth existence in Seoul, where he encounters Hae-mi, an attractive girl his own age who introduces herself as a former high school classmate; when he can't immediately call her to mind, she explains that she's transformed her appearance through plastic surgery.

Briefly, the pair become sexually involved, but then Hae-mi announces that she's off on a trip to Africa, enlisting Jong-su to take care of her small apartment and her strangely elusive cat.

On her return, she introduces the instantly suspicious Jong-su to the new man in her life, the somewhat older, much more sophisticated Ben, a globetrotting, Porsche-driving playboy with no visible means of support.

"I play," Ben says airily when Jong-su asks him flat-out how he spends his time. What this means is not immediately clear, but part of the picture gets filled in when all three characters head out to the farm where Jong-su spent his childhood. Here Ben makes an ambiguous, stoned confession that proves to be the film's turning point, as well as supplying its title. This is the kind of film that all but demands a second viewing in order to appreciate the complex elegance of the design, assembled from details systematically calculated to lend themselves to more than one interpretation. Virtually every scene is shown from the perspective of Jong-su, with Hae-mi and Ben remaining as enigmatic to us as they are to him. Yet it remains uncertain who is the real author of the story we are watching—that is, how far Hae-mi and Ben are manipulating Jong-su, either jointly or separately, and how far he is projecting his fantasies onto them in turn.  In effect, we are seduced into inventing our own stories about what is "really" happening between the three.