Playroom (7): Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), dir. Hong Sang-soo

Another winter film. The room that receives it gives itself to a waiting more exact than curiosity. The light is grey and held steady. Streets are narrow. Restaurants are spare. A small office borrows a view of a wall. The camera sits and allows tables to do their work of keeping bodies within speaking distance. Two men and a woman come forward and then withdraw. One of the men makes films and talks about scripts with a seriousness that protects him from himself. The other owns a gallery and talks about money and about feeling in the same tone. The woman writes and carries notebooks and says little until her silence begins to stand in for a thought the others do not know where nor how to place. The city is not a background. It is a climate that persuades speech to come out as steam from ice. The film erases itself and then rewrites the same lines with a pressure that is almost the same and almost not.

The title is a hinge that opens onto another room and keeps it partly shut. A virgin is stripped and the bachelors are her bachelors and they belong to the title as if they were objects on a table or the large glass of Duchamps. It remembers a work of glass and metal that turned desire into a machine and then allowed that machine to rust in public light. To speak the title is to accept that people will be treated as surfaces and as instruments and that the film will behave as if the glass had learned to move of its own accord. The movement is slow. A hand takes a hand. A hand lets go. The camera returns to a corner where a bottle of clear spirit sits in the middle distance like a small lighthouse that summons and warns. Words are spoken with the slight emphasis of the person who suspects himself of playing a part and wishes to straighten the line of his speech with another round. All speaking is sculpting boundaries.

The film gives itself in two movements that are the same movement told twice. Each scene returns with a grace that is cruel. This is not a trick. It is a way of teaching the eye to accept that the thing that happened will not finish happening. The restaurant is the same restaurant. The walk is the same walk. A stairwell remembers the same two bodies by the impression they left in the air. The second telling is not a correction. It is a laying of another sheet over the first and the mark does not line up quite with the earlier mark. The small shift carries everything. A greeting that looked tender learns to look like rehearsal. A refusal that seemed firm learns to seem like a pause placed where it could be admired. The viewer, who had taken the first set of facts as sufficient, discovers that sufficiency was the first misunderstanding.

The woman at the centre is present with a neutrality that embarrasses the men who accumulate their claims around rather than for her. She is called a virgin and this name is a contract that does not bind her, though it binds the men to a ritual of testing that turns them into the objects they wished to use. She declines with a courtesy that shortens the day. She agrees with the same courtesy and the day grows long with the labour of speech that wants to prove itself equal to kindness. Her words are precise and fragmentary. They have the quality of notes taken in a room where someone else believes he is dictating. She allows the dictation to continue because interruption would require a violence she is not prepared to take up and own. The film protects her from the obligation to declare herself. It teaches the viewer to accept that declaration is not always the honest form of presence.

The men are types of a single care that believes it can manage the interval between willingness and refusal. One has the charm of a plan. He speaks of projects and futures and of the rare moment where the chance to begin can be seized if the heart is brave enough to ignore the small shames of convenience. He invites the woman to lunch in order to prove that kindness can be arranged by calendar. The other has the charm of a brimming glass. He speaks of immediacy, of how the truth of an hour is not in the talk about it but in the contact that births talk by abolishing its need. He invites the woman to drink in order to show that an hour can be redeemed from the poverty of prudence. Both are sincere. Both are practised. Both are exhausted by their sincerity and their practice. The film refuses to pity them. Pity would be another way of giving them back the authority the day has quietly stolen from them.

Because the scenes return, gestures acquire the authority of a repeated error. A hand that touched with the assurance of being welcome is shown again and becomes a hand that touches in order to be forgiven in advance. A compliment becomes a script. A silence that looked like thought becomes a silence that has learned that to speak would be to assist a robbery. A small gift becomes a tax. The second iteration does not accuse. It holds the first in view while it stands beside it with the calm of someone who has decided to remain in the room until the need for an explanation has passed. In that calm much of the drama that would ordinarily be performed dissolves. What remains is the bare negotiation by which people decide how much of their time they will allow to be owned by others.The film is black and white in a manner that is not nostalgic. The absence of colour clarifies the business at hand. It removes the ornament that permits a viewer to be lazy, and it returns attention to the edge of a glass, the shape of a sleeve, the grain of a tabletop, the faint change in a face when politeness has been taxed and a small line appears beside the mouth as if it were a place to rest a second thought. In this palette winter is not a season. It is a discipline that keeps bodies within a certain radius of one another. The camera respects this radius. It rarely enters the intimacy it shows. It remains seated, a guest who knows that the most faithful witness is the one who does not become a participant.

There are shots that return like a sentence someone repeats in order to hear whether it has changed. A corridor that leads to a lift. An exterior where the street looks like a page that forgets and remembers footsteps. A bed that is a decision rather than a piece of furniture. A car where a confession is attempted and fails because confessions are contracts and the contract in this scene cannot be drafted within the confines of a moving shell of glass and metal. The film lets the failure be gentle. It does not turn it into a lesson. It does not turn it into a punishment. It leaves it as a failure that belongs to the nature of speech when speech is asked to carry more than it can carry.

Eating and drinking are obligations carried out under the pressure of watchfulness. People pour because a bottle is on the table. People raise and lower chopsticks because a plate has been placed between two futures that will not occur. In the second telling, the same acts resemble the movements of someone discovering that etiquette is a weapon that can be used with a smile. No one, however, is stabbed. Someone loses their appetite and then pretends to have found it. Someone eats to pass the time that courtesy has made unendurable. The film trusts the viewer to see that the body is the register where the day writes what cannot be said aloud.

The title insists on stripping. Stripping is literal and it is not. The film is more concerned with the slow removal of forms that shield people from themselves. An idea is stripped. A story is stripped. A reputation is stripped. Clothes come off in rooms where the light is flat and the bed is a field where fear and bravery begin to resemble each other. The stripping is never granted the glamour that its name would like to steal. It is a procedure that exposes not skin but the line where desire stops and the plan that sought to manage desire begins to work against itself. The woman keeps that line visible. She allows others to cross it in speech and sometimes in touch. When she crosses it herself, she does so without the permission that would purchase forgiveness. This freedom is small and exact. It is the kind that cannot be taught because it refuses to become a rule.

If there is a confession that matters, it is made to the viewer. The two movements of the film confess that the first was inadequate and that the second will not remedy the first. The confession is not an apology. It is a way of letting the audience live through the event of repetition without the comfort of completion. A story can be told twice without becoming two stories. It becomes a weather system in which the same pressure creates another wind. A sentence can be said twice and the second time it refuses to carry the weight the first time asked of it. This is the film’s wisdom. It has the courage to leave us with a shape that does not close.

There are people off to the side who carry out the tasks that keep the rooms open. A waitress who refills without asking what is being refilled in the hearts of those who are speaking. A clerk who brings a key with the grace of someone who knows that doors must open and close regardless of who passes. A colleague who takes a call and does not ask to know what the call cost. These minor figures are not background. They anchor the public life that permits the private life of the central trio to maintain its pretence of being unique. The film respects them by not making them speak when silence is their work. 

In this respect the film is a just city.The men imagine their suffering is extraordinary and are relieved to discover that the city will absorb it without fuss. They seek a scene where their confusion will be honoured. The city offers them a table and a glass and a bill. The woman imagines nothing and therefore remains capable of seeing the table and the glass and the bill as the real conditions under which one acts. She is neither cruel nor soft. She is present. Presence in this film is the only virtue that survives repetition. It is the practice of being equal to the hour without insisting on being remembered for it.

The first movement ends as if a solution had been reached through exhaustion. The second movement returns and removes the illusion that exhaustion is ever a solution. The same exchange becomes less explanatory and more exposed. The film moves a few chairs. The chairs become sentences. The sentences rewrite the relation between consent and speech. A refusal can now be heard for what it was. An invitation can now be heard as a demand that was cleverly dressed up. A question reveals itself as the preparation for an excuse. The woman’s replies bear the minimum of tone required to keep the conversation from becoming theatre. Her economy is severe. It is also the only kindness that does not lie.

Humour arrives in small embarrassing fits. It saves no one. It lets the viewer breathe between recognitions. Someone falls asleep in a room that is not his own and the morning clarifies the lie that allowed him to imagine himself generous. Someone explains a plan to protect the woman and the explanation shows that protection is a word for control when spoken by a person who fears his own absence. The film puts these scenes alongside the others without emphasising their difference. The laughter belongs to the same winter. It is a lighter air that does not change the temperature.

Jealousy is present as a method rather than as a mood. A man uses it to test his hold over a narrative that he suspects has ceased to belong to him. He introduces a name and watches for a flinch. He invents a schedule and watches for a correction. The woman declines the test by refusing to make the flinch and take the correction into her workings. The refusal is not an assertion of power. It is an assertion of measure. She will not take on the work of keeping a story intact that is not hers to keep. The film aligns itself with this measure. It refuses the flourish that would give jealousy a climax worthy of a play. It lets it pass like a weak weather front.

The images are patient with small objects that become custodians of time. A scarf that appears in both tellings becomes a thread through which we can feel the hour tighten and loosen. A notebook that is opened and closed with a minimum of ceremony becomes a record of the distance between thinking and saying. A lighter that does not work becomes the goad of a moment where two people must decide whether to be embarrassed or to kiss. The film has an affection for these objects that does not sentimentalise them. It knows that the day cannot be carried without such minor carriers.

There is a night walk that refuses to become romantic and therefore becomes exact. The street does not perform. It holds two figures without pressure and lets them discover that the only liberty the night grants is the liberty to be slow. The second movement returns to this walk and the steps no longer pretend to be new. The recognition is not disappointment. It is the truth that repetition is how we know what we have done. The walk is now a memory held at the same time as a present scene, and the two together make a third that cannot be reduced to either. This third is where the film lives.The woman’s room is shown in a way that does not betray her. It is small and orderly and the bed is a clear fact. The men enter as if they were measuring their own voice against a space that will not give it back with more kindness than it deserves. A scene that would elsewhere be made to solve everything arrives, occurs, and leaves people alone with their bodies. The camera does not chase the privacy it has been granted. It remains at the distance that keeps privacy intact even when privacy has consented to be seen. Afterwards, the talk is the same talk that always follows. The film lets it be foolish without making fools.

If there is a single mask the film removes, it is the mask of narrative vanity. Each person thinks they are the author of what happens. Each tells themself a story so that the hour can be borne. The double movement tears this comfort gently and reveals that authorship has been shared with time and with the smallest objects and with a city that refuses to let drama acquire a larger share of its air than it needs. This revelation is not a rebuke. It is the ground on which anyone can continue. The film does not punish vanity. It notices it and makes room around it for a modesty that stands like a chair against a wall.

The last scenes do not assemble a verdict. The woman leaves a room without closing the door softly and the sound is not a code. A man smiles at a thought he will not speak and the smile does not redeem him. A conversation on a staircase pauses at the landing where decisions are usually made and then continues without deciding anything. The title returns and the bachelors are still beside their machine, which has not stopped, and the virgin is still stripping and being stripped and the action will go on until there is nothing left to remove except what cannot be shown. The film remains loyal to this impossibility. It ends by letting the day finish itself without our help.

What remains for the viewer is not a moral and not an insight that can be displayed. It is a practice. One learns to sit at a table and hear the difference between a request and a demand disguised as care. One learns to accept that repetition is not failure but the condition under which events reveal their edge. One learns to leave a room before the door decides to be shut with meaning. One learns to speak briefly when someone else is using many words to avoid the fact that a glass is empty and the bill is coming. The film shows this practice without self regard. It keeps the dignity of those who have been looked at. It keeps the neutrality that lets looking be a form of respect rather than a possession.

We leave with a winter that is not the weather. It is the reserve that protects the hour from our appetite for closure. The reserve is the film’s gift. It can be taken into any other room. It is an equality between people that refuses to be founded on knowledge. It is the distance within which a hand can be taken and released without debt. The film has taught it by telling the same day twice and by allowing us to discover that the space between the two is where truth keeps itself.