About This Film
“The Widow” is quite a significant production for the cinema of S. Korea as much as unlucky for its director, Park Nam-ok, a Korean athlete who became a journalist and then a director. The significance lies with the fact that this was the first film to be directed by a woman in Korea and the one that opened the First Woman Film Festival in Seoul in 1997. The unlucky part has to do with the fact that Park found it extremely difficult to complete the film, which took her 6 months to do so, particularly because her sex made the owners of a number of recording facilities for post-production reluctant to let her use their space and equipment. Furthermore, only one theater in Seoul showed the movie and only for four days, expectedly resulting in financial failure for Park, who decided not to pursue filmmaking after that. Lastly, the only known print of the film lacks the last reel completely, while the second to last reel is missing the soundtrack.
Synopsis
The titular character is a young war widow named Sin-ja, who barely manages to sustain herself and her young daughter Joo, and shares the premises with two other tenants, a disillusioned single woman (who even drinks and smokes), and a drunkard. She receives some financial help from a friend of her husband, Lee Seong-jin, a rather well-off president of a successful company. However, since Sin-ja is very beautiful, Lee’s reasons are not exactly altruistic, and his rather jealous and controlling wife soon comes knocking Sin-ja’s door, demanding to leave her husband alone. The timid and shy Sin-ja is “saved” by her next-door neighbor, who gives Mrs. Lee a taste of her own verbal medicine. Soon, however, it is revealed that Mrs. Lee is not exactly the face of virtue herself, since she uses the money her husband gives her to accommodate her lover, a young man named Taek. One day in the beach, all four of the characters appear at the same time, in a series of events that end up with Taek saving Joo from drowning and him and Sin-ja starting a romantic relationship, to the growing frustration of Mrs. Lee. Eventually, Sin-ja “exploits” Taek, using his money to set up a business, inviting him to move in, and even leaving her daughter to her drunkard neighbor to take care. At one point however, Taek’s girlfriend, whom he considered dead, returns and the young man has to choose between the two women and all that they represent.
