AN AFFAIR (1998)
Directed by: Lee Jae-Yong
Starring: Lee Mi-Sook, Lee Jung-Jae

"...an arresting debut by young director Lee Jae-Yong that will appeal to buffs...who can recognize the genre-bending at work."

-Derek Elley, Variety

An Affair pins marriage to the dissecting tray and goes to work, laying it open and exposing its guts to the unblinking eye of the camera. Seo-Hyun has lived all her life as a good girl and, now married, she's the kind of lady who gives the Stepford wives a good name. Her sister is getting married, and asks Seo-Hyun to help her fiance' plan the wedding while she wraps things up in the US. The two meet, and something inside Seo-Hyun wakes up hungry. Her sister’s fiance’ is hungry, too and before long their orderly lives are as shattered as their wedding vows. 

Resembling a Raymond Carver story, An Affair is a minimalist nightmare filmed in different degrees of sterility, ranging from art gallery clean to ICU antiseptic. Ritualizing modern life, it horrifyingly reduces our complex, multi-faceted existences into a series of possessions and empty, repetitive tasks: picking up the kids, dropping off the kids, having a meal, sitting in a coffee shop, picking up the kids, making dinner, dropping off the kids, feeding the fish, having sex. It all unfolds in icy, stark interiors, devoid of everything but the most significant objects. Modern living is distilled into a thin, clear poison that kills the heart.

The first film from director E J-Yong, this was a popular arthouse film in Korea, with most of the attention going to Lee Mi-Sook's performance as the robotic, middle-aged Seo-Hyun. Lee was a popular actress in the ‘80s, but in 1987 she got married and retired from film. An Affair is her comeback and, now 39, she plays the gorgeously repressed Seo-Hyun as if she's drawing from her own life. Audiences were shocked to see a sexualized woman over the age of 29 up on screen, but they may have been more shocked (although they won't admit it) of what hay An Affair makes of their own lives. Because Seo-Hyun may have it together when the movie begins, except having it together looks like a living hell. As her affair blossoms and her skin goes from a metallic grey to a flushed pink, the outpouring of emotions destroys the lives of everything and everyone standing nearby, as implacably as a virus. This is movie-viewing as an exercise in audience discomfort. Razor-edged and lonely, An Affair is ultimately a test of the audiences' empathy as it takes them by the hair and drags them over the broken pieces of someone else's life.