The Korean movie Oh! Soo-jung was shown in the U.S. with the terrible title, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000). It was written and directed by Sang-soo Hong.

Eun-ju Lee stars as Soo-jung, a young woman who is a script-writer for a TV series, produced by Young-soo (played by Moon Sung-keun). Jae-hoon (portrayed by Jeong Bo-seok) is a wealthy art gallery owner. Young-soo hopes to get Jae-hoon to finance a film that he is directing.

Soo-jung is very beautiful, and both men would like to get into bed with her. As the title suggests, she is a virgin, although whether she would like to stay a virgin is never clear.

Sang-soo Hong is an interesting director, but you'll have to decide whether you like his style. The characters talk, smoke, and eat out at what I think are the Korean equivalent of our diners. Scenes start and stop almost at random. Sometimes we see the same scene from a slightly different point of view. The dialog is almost the same, but not quite.

One scene stops in the middle, and then picks up later in the movie. The movie isn't preseted in a linear fashion. Sometimes we see flashbacks of how scenes begin after we've viewed the scene itself.

The movie is all about sex, but we don't actually see much sex. There's one sex scene that's hard to watch. It's consensual--sort of--but it's about as erotic as the Korean dish kimchi.

We had seen another film by Sang-soo Hong, Claire's Camera (2017), and enjoyed it. That was a hit, but this was a miss.

The movie worked well on the small screen. It's shot in grim black and white, which is OK. I don't think it would have been improved by color. The film has an adequate IMDb rating of 7.0. I didn't think it was quite that good--I gave it a 6.

Hong Sang-soo really is probably the greatest director almost no one has heard of, at least from Asia if not the whole world. That said, I'm not sure I like this one quite as much as his earlier "The Power of Kangwon Province", if only because it doesn't quite have the same sense of distinct urban anomie that I love. It might be an all-around more well-constructed film though, if borderline too strictly formalist. It's too bad these are the only two films of his available on DVD because otherwise I'd make watching all of them a priority. It's funny that the film has such a rigid sense of structuralism and yet is infused with such a real, intimate sense of humanism. The film is divided into two halves (each with eight chapters), showing roughly the same courtship between a man and a woman, first from what appears to be his perspective, and then from hers (although the specific point-of-view is never directly announced and it is possible they overlap somewhat). This sounds pretty gimmicky, and in a sense it skirts that line, but like I was saying it is presented in such a straight-forward, empathetic way that it barely seems cerebral or detached at all. It's really quite remarkable, i think, what a truly empathetic tone the film has. Although visually somewhat similar to the work of the great Tawainese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, the film has none of Hou's pronounced sense of detachment or aloofness. Instead it feels incredibly intimate and humane. Still, the rigid structural devise, if not quite gimmicky, does create a certain repetitiveness, since unlike "Rashomon" the two versions of events don't usually differ in very overt ways (although there are some differences). I wouldn't normally call the film slow (as minimalistic as the camera style is, it moves along fairly briskly), but the repetition does make it seem like it drags at times over the course of it's two hour length. Still, it's overall a pretty great film. Some of the most honest, heartfelt, no-frills relationship stuff I've ever seen in a film, actually. The last scene in particular is one of the nicest things I've seen in a while.

Wealthy art gallery owner Jae-hoon (Jeong Bo-seok) waits in a hotel room to have sex with screenwriter Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju). She phones, however, and claims to be running late and expresses some doubts about consummating their relationship. Later, the scene is replayed but from Soo-jung's point of view with a different result. With its title derived from a surreal artwork by Marcel Duchamp titled "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors", Hong Sang-soo's elliptical comedy drama A Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors is a process of discovery for both the characters and the viewer. Whether the theme is viewed as the subjectivity of memory or how our perceptions change with each new event, Hong strips away the illusion from romantic love and allows us to see how ambivalent we all may be beyond our idealization.

The film is divided into five parts, each chapter introduced by enigmatic titles such as "Perhaps Intention", "Perhaps Coincidence", and "Perhaps Accident", and separated by a fade to black, reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger in Paradise. The first, third, and fifth parts take place in the present; the second and fourth parts show the history of the couple from their first encounter to the present and reflect the characters' different perceptions/memories. The chapter "Perhaps by Accident" seems to describe Jae-hoon as one who believes that reality is controlled by fate. "Perhaps Intention" describes the assumptions of Soo-jung who makes her decisions based on her assessment of men's true motives and values, judging them by their actions not their words.

From the outset, the film's narrative appears to be linear as it traces a love triangle that develops between Jae-hoon, Soo-jung and Young-soo, an independent filmmaker. The characters are very real and their desires and frustrations are palpable. However, halfway through, the film begins to repeat episodes from earlier chapters which are dramatized from a different perspective and show slight variations in detail. The second chapter is a flashback to the couple's first meeting. Filmmaker Young-soo (Moon Seong-keun) attends an exhibition at Jae-hoon's art gallery with Soo-jung to gain some inspiration for the film they are working on. The two agree to have lunch with Jae-hoon, perhaps to persuade the wealthy gallery owner to provide some financial backing for the film.

A few days later, when Jae-hoon meets Soo-jung at Kyongbokgoong Palace, he discovers that she has a pair of gloves that he accidentally left on a bench and believes the incident to be very much a coincidence. When the incident is dramatized the second time, however, it appears that Soo-jung has intentionally scheduled the film crew to meet on the Palace grounds because she knows that Jae-hoon goes there for lunch. Jae-hoon becomes attracted to Soo-jung and asks her to have sex with him and become her lover. She tells him that she will accept his offer but only when they go out for a drink. The sex scenes are erotic but not graphic and reveal the lovers' emotional pain lying just beneath the surface.

Enhanced by an exquisite original score by OK Kil-sung and the striking black and white cinematography of Choi Yeong-taek, Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors is a beautiful and thoughtful film whose concluding epiphany left me with a lovely glow. Sadly, however, the glow was short lived as I soon discovered that on the night of February 22, 2005, Lee Eun-ju committed suicide at her apartment only a few days after graduating from Dankook University. She was only 24 years old. The memory of her great performance in this outstanding film will long remain.