Gong Hyo-hee is a famously successful businesswoman who heads a major conglomerate and who fills her day with meetings, inspirational speeches, and cocktail pleasantries with envious male colleagues. At night, she returns to her home in the suburbs, takes a cursory glance at her children, and falls exhausted into bed, where she is often haunted by strange dreams of a woman calling out to her. She is told that the woman in the dream represents a lost twin sister who died as an infant.
One day she gets into her car and drives out to a seaside town. As she approaches the shore, suddenly a mob of angry villagers surrounds her car. Frightened, she tries to run away, but is then caught (in a net!) by a group of fisherwomen. She is bound and taken by boat out to a remote island, where an unknown man exchanges cash for her. Then she is dragged back to a small hut, where her captor insists that she is his wife, and that she won’t be able to escape as she did the last time. Her denials and protests fall on deaf ears. Thus begins her absurd and harrowing new life as an island woman, “married” to an abusive stranger.
This bizarre, modernist feature from Kim Soo-yong was released in 1978 and stars Yoon Jeong-hee, a major actress of the 1960s and 1970s who will be familiar to contemporary viewers for her leading role in Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry. With its blurred, garish colors and disorienting camera angles, Splendid Outing is an exhilarating aesthetic exercise at the same time as being a thought-provoking and troubling story.
The film’s narrative is founded on the juxtaposition between a modern, emancipated woman in a modern city and a wife enslaved among the rocks of a remote island. Momentary glimpses of Seoul intercut between shots of our heroine’s struggles on the island drive home this contrast, and on the most basic level serve as a visual reminder of the extremes of Korean society: urban and rural, wealthy and poor. But the film isn’t primarily concerned with this kind of social message, and plays more as a psychological tease or puzzle. At every turn, the film tries to disorient its viewer.
Of course, Splendid Outing’s gender issues are impossible to ignore. Although not a feminist film by any means, it suggests the existence of a primal aggression towards women that lurks just below the surface of modern society. Gong Hyo-hee has climbed the social ladder as high as it will take her, but the narrative’s bizarre twists suggest that subjugation and humiliation may be only one false step away. It’s a melancholy sort of work, that empathizes with its protagonist but at the same time remains distant and enigmatic enough to defy easy interpretation.
Darcy Paquet