A Quiet Dream

There are many reasons for fans of Korean cinema to love this multilayered comedy selected as the opening film for the 2016 Busan International Film Festival. The story of three goofballs vying for the affection of the attractive owner (Han Ye-ri) of a dive bar in a scrappy Seoul neighborhood, it derives much of its good-natured humor from its casting. The three wooers are all well-known independent actor-directors playing riffs on characters from their own films. Yang Ik-june plays a vagabond gangster (as he did in Breathless), Park Jung-bum is a defector from North Korea (as he was in The Journals of Musan), and Yoon Jong-bin’s character is reminiscent of the army private he played in Unforgiven. From this clever conceit, director Zhang Lu spins an easygoing reverie mixing real life, fantasy, and dreams that Variety film critic Maggie Lee hails as “a whimsical, frequently poetic urban rhapsody buoyed by its deadpan dropout protagonists.” (Dir.: Zhang Lu, Korea, 2016, 98 min., B&W and color, DCP, Korean with English subtitles)