One of the hottest tickets at its Pusan festival world preem, thanks to an advance rep for verbal and visual raunch, Girls' Night Out skillfully avoids being simply a Korean stab at the women-talking-about-sex genre that's almost become a cliché in North American indie cinema. Though the three lead characters are too neatly balanced in their makeup (low-sex, high-sex, no-sex), and most Korean women really don't talk like this (though how many American women do, either?), the movie's an entertaining, sexy ride that deserves play on Western screens in the coming year. The trio of 29-year-olds are Ho-jeong (Kang Su-yeon), upwardly mobile head of a design firm who, much to the chagrin of her regular b.f., will tango with anything in pants she fancies; Yeon (Jin Heui-kyeong), a lobby-lounge waitress who dreams of marriage but whose lack of sack technique is grating on her partner; and Sun (Kim Yeo-jin), a graduate student who's still waiting for the right guy to come along and relieve her of her virginity. Mostly using a hand-held camera and deploying a patchwork approach with rapid fade-outs, first-time writer-director Im Sang-soo draws spirited performances from his cast (all of whom contributed to reshaping the dialogue) that match the pic's restless energy.
Derek Elley