Nam-ok Park’s 1955 film The Widow is highly
worthwhile viewing, notable as the first Korean film to be directed by a woman,
and marked by its sympathetic treatment of female perspectives. Shin is a
single mother, widowed by the war, established in the early scenes as weighed
down by money problems but also as independent-spirited, not inclined to
settle; she’s financially assisted by an older acquaintance, but doesn’t sleep
with him, contrary to his wife’s suspicions. Meanwhile the wife herself has a
lover, Taek, who eventually in turn falls for Shin, their marriage plans
imperiled by the return of Taek’s old love, whom he’d assumed to be also dead.
The film’s examination of societal pressures on women evokes Ozu’s films of the
period, but the comparison (not an entirely fair one of course) rather
underlines The Widow’s lack of formal rigour and the relative softness
of its approach (perhaps summed up by the recurring use of Rogers and Hammerstein’s
Some Enchanted Evening). At the time of writing, the film can only be
viewed in a truncated version in which the second-last reel is without a
soundtrack, and the final reel is missing altogether, and although that’s
obviously objectively not for the best, it does lend what’s left a rather
singular vanishing quality. Just before the sound disappears, the film briefly
detours for the first time into becoming a musical, and then a narrative that
seemed geared toward a romantic coming together becomes one of separation, felt
all the more deeply for the silence, underlined by a series of shots of her
feet as she walks alone, and then later by a corresponding series of his feet,
and a final shot of Taek alone in the night, staring in the direction of his lost
love, the sudden imposition of the end seeming to define an absence and a
longing that can never be filled or mitigated.
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