This charming film won the New Currents Award at the 9th Pusan International Film Festival, it was in the 2005 Sundance competition and it was in the 2005 Berlin Forum competition, where it won the Netpac Prize.

Jeong-hae (Kim Ji-soo) works at a post office. She lives in an apartment not far from work, orders things from television home shopping, and takes care of a stray kitten she has taken in. This is her world.

One day an aspiring writer, Guy (Hwang Jung-min) walks into her life, as he stops by the post office to send a manuscript. After seeing him at the post office a couple of times, she invites him home for dinner acting on an impulse.

She wants to get on with her life.

For most of the film we just follow Jeong-hae and her completely uneventful life. Nothing happens. She seems happy and content, that nothing happens. Nearly at the end of the film we get some short flashbacks making us understand, why she is content that nothing much happens. We begin to understand, why she is this way and also why she slowly seems ready to get on with her life.

This is mostly a visual story about Jeong-hae and the sort of atmosphere by which she is enveloped. On the surface nothing happens, but below the surface the film manages very well to draw a quiet and fascinating portrait of a wounded girl, trying to heal her inner wounds by herself without complaining about them to the world.

"This Charming Girl" is the feature debut of director Lee Yoon-ki. It is also the feature debut of Kim Ji-soo, though she has a prolific television career behind her. She appeared in several popular TV series and was awarded MBC’s Best Performance Award for her acting in "General Hospital" (1995).

If you need your films to full of action or open drama, you have probably already stopped reading this review. But if you like a quiet, thoughtful and beautiful commentary of an ordinary girl, you will be well rewarded watching "This Charming Girl".

Uffe Stegmann
March 6, 2005

GALLERY