CHRISTMAS IN AUGUST (1998)
Directed by: Hur Jin-Ho
Starring: Han Suk-Kyu, Shim Eun-Ha

"...a wrenchingly associative feel-good/feel-bad classic where everything is seen through panes of glass, and a meter maid learns more than she ever wanted to know about expired time."

- Chuck Stephens, Film Comment

The sidelong glance, the shared ice cream, the lazy afternoon nap, the date that no one's calling a date — out of these tiny details Christmas in August builds a movie about the beginning of falling in love. Considered by many to be the Great Korean Movie Romance, this is a gentle mediation on life, death, and parking violations that lingers on your eyes long after it's over.

Han Suk-Kyu runs a photo shop in a rural suburb of Seoul. He's terminally ill, but keeps it to himself. He's a little too quick to laugh, covering up the rage that burns in him at the unfairness of this death sentence. He acts like everything's going A-OK, but when no one's looking he crumbles.'

Shim Eun-Ha is a meter maid, tucked into a starched uniform and dispatched onto the streets where she and her partner are pariahs, chased out of restaurants and bullied by angry motorists. The two of them slog on, dispensing tickets, photographing offending vehicles, writing writs and summons.

One day she drops off photos at Han Suk-Kyu's place, and they meet, and they like each other. That's it. That's the movie. But within this sketchy outline there're volumes on happiness and despair, on living and dying. It's there in the way the characters study each other when no one's looking, in the impatient way Han Suk-Kyu teaches his dad how to use the VCR, in the excitement of Shim Eun-Ha waiting for a date, in the way she tells and retells a joke, even when she mangles it.

So transcendent that too many words will ruin the delicate spell it casts, this is the director's first film, and the movie that made Shim Eun-Ha a superstar. The performances, operating on some attenuated wavelength not visible to human sight, are riveting in their simplicity. Like a lazy summer evening, there's something inexplicably rewarding about such a small, quiet movie that sets out to speak about life, death, and love, slowly, gently, and without pretension. Most folks assume that slow and gentle equals "boring" and "box office death", but that wasn't the case with Christmas. In 1998, it swept the Korean Film Awards, coming away with "Best Picture", "Best Director", "Best Actress" (Shim Eun-Ha), and "Best Cinematography" and its fans are legion - rabid in their devotion to this movie.

Christmas in August talks about the big things in life by focusing on the small. It's there in the way friends speak when they go out for drinks, in the shared late night walk, in the eating of a watermelon. It's there in the way a man who's dying and a woman who's living realize that we build our lives out of the details, and that while we're alive every one of them is like frozen time. And that after we're gone, all the details, all the perfect mornings, all the shared experiences, all the times we talked to someone who was really listening — after we're gone it's all lost, forever.