Aein (2005)

Director:

Eun-tae Kim

Writer:

Chang-hun Yun (writer)

Release Date:

8 December 2005 (South Korea)

Genre:

Romance

Plot Keywords:

Sex | Nudity | Oral Sex | Mind Game | Fling

Cast

Dong-hyuk Jo
Ye-ryeong Kim
Hyeon-a Seong

Also Known As:

Lover (International: English title)
The Intimate (Singapore: English title)

Runtime:

98 min

Country:

South Korea

Language:

Korean

Color:

Color

Certification:

South Korea:18 | Singapore:R21

Filming Locations:

South Korea

Company:

Kihweck Shidae

A Nutshell Review: The Intimate

If I were to summarize this movie in a few words, this would be it: Serendipity with plenty of sex.

Telling a story of two strangers who meet by chance in an elevator, The Intimate follows their journey through the day and night (which doesn't seem to end by the way), as they discover about each other, and about themselves in the process. Kinda like Before Sunrise in its treatment, the lovers, nameless except known as Boy (Jo Dong-Hyuk) and Girl (Sung Hyun- Ah), play the usual courtship mind games, playing coy, being aggressive, taking turns to bust each others chops as they fall into each other's arms.

Sounds like your typical romance movie, no? At certain points the usual elements are there, like plot devices romanticizing a bench and hand drawn pictures, and the mushy things lovers whisper to the ears of another. Clichéd highlights include one needing to leave the country the next day, and the other being engaged to someone else, and now both of them, by Fate, are presented a chance to do something totally different. But in this story, it managed to take aged old questions of doubt, and weave a compelling movie around them.

The basic question will be what is love. Is it supposed to be long drawn and lasting a lifetime, or is the feeling actually made up of short passionate bursts? And after being with someone for so long, is it a question of being afraid to leave the comfort zone of familiarity, or does it boil down truly to faithfulness? The nagging fear of being about to marry someone, and then you meet your soulmate - what do you do? Blame the person for turning up in your life too late? And it is somehow true that the longer you know someone, the more faults that you will find, and the question is, will you be able to live with those faults, or do you prefer to live in that constant crest of emotional highs and bailing out when the slightest inclination of such faults start to rear its head?

It helps that both leads are eye-candy, as they offer you a chance to answer some of those questions yourself if you were to put yourselves in their shoes and be offered the same set of temptations - here's what you currently have, and here's what someone else can offer. What would you do? If there is a gripe, it'll be the one-dimensional fiancé that somehow has to be demonized in order to make the other option all the more appealing.

It's a relatively engaging movie, though watching the out takes while the end credits rolled made you appreciate the movie's direction a little more. While those scenes which were left out may be seen as more interesting, somehow I felt it would have disrupted the pace and dragged events rather than having it all compacted into a screen duration of 24 hours. It would have been a totally different look and feel altogether, but probably not for the better.