Seeing oneself through someone else’s eyes can be illuminating, but it can also be quite intoxicating — especially when said eyes belong to an artist eager to look at everything around him as fodder for his own artmaking. Koya Kamura’s “Winter in Sokcho” (an adaptation of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novel by the same name) stages that very tension between a French-Korean young woman and an older French illustrator. The two forge an odd kinship that is as tenuous as it is enticing and which proves, throughout Kamura’s wistful twinned portrait of alienation, hard to maintain and harder still to understand.
The life Soo-Ha (Bella Kim) finds herself living in the small fishing town of Sokcho is structured by a rote kind of routine. Despite the scholarly aspirations that had first driven her to study literature, Soo-Ha now works at a boarding house where she cooks and cleans for those visiting the seaside town even during its slow wintry season. It’s there she meets Yan Kerrand (Roschdy Zem), an artist who’s eager to plunge himself into everyday Sokcho life in hopes it’ll stir the requisite inspiration he needs for a graphic novel.
From the start these two laconic characters are oddly drawn to one another. It helps that she can speak French fluently and can thus serve as a helpful guide to her dead-end town. She remains there to stay close to her aging mother, even as her aspiring model boyfriend insists the two could make a life in Seoul.
Soo-Ha is clearly adrift. Behind her round glasses and her bulky winter clothes, she spends her days looking out, perhaps as a way of avoiding looking in. That’s why Yan’s arrival so rankles her — or awakens her, really. She cannot help but see in him the specter of her father,:a French engineer who left Sokcho without knowing he was leaving a pregnant woman behind. Indeed, the more Soo-Ha researches Yan’s work (striking inked illustrations she admits she loves due to their melancholy sensibility) and plays begrudging local guide (even driving him to the DMZ), the more she’s entranced by his artistry and his inscrutable demeanor. Soon, she’s not just happy to play translator as he buys art supplies but insinuates herself into his everyday life, spying on him from an adjoining room and leafing through his work when he’s not around. She’s even keen to cook for him: a way, perhaps, to show off her own talents.
For Yan, Soo-Ha proves to be a great asset, even as he increasingly tries to keep their intimacy in check. He’s there to take in the sights and get lost in the landscapes, so it makes sense he’s soon unsettled by the tight-knit bond this young woman is all too eager to nurture. As the winter days get colder, Soo-Ha finds she’s more and more alienated from those around her. She’s disillusioned with her boyfriend and irritated by her mother. It is only Yan who keeps her alert. But is she looking for a surrogate father figure or for a different kind of lover? Do his illustrations inspire her own artistry or do they encourage her to see herself as a wily muse? Or is this, perhaps, a transactional, extractive relationship that was never meant to get so out of hand?
“Winter in Sokcho” is not particularly interested in neatly answering any one of those questions. Fascinated by the thorny, murky ways in which we connect with strangers under unusual circumstances, Kamura and co-writer Stéphane Ly-Cuong mine Yan and Soo-Ha’s twisty dynamic for all it’s worth. At times, the film plays like a muted romance; at others, like a domestic thriller. There’s a knotted tension throughout that risks ballooning out of control, that could just as easily end in a steamy affair or a violent one.
Therein lies what makes this beautifully paced adaptation such a joy to watch. Kim and Zem spend much of the film merely having their respective characters observing one another — with curiosity, apprehension and, sometimes, even with something resembling desire. But script and film alike demand they keep a distance. Some of its most affecting shots, in fact, depend on it: two hands on opposite sides of the table tackling food with chopsticks; a face reflected in a steamed mirror; darkened watercolor animations that heighten Soo-Ha’s sensory experience. Kamura has a knack for still frames that tell as much a story as his sparse dialogue. He also knows when to bring in Delphine Malausséna’s romantic score to offset the eerie silent stillness that runs through much of his film.
At every turn, Kamura’s direction enriches the stoic story it’s telling. It constantly refuses to collapse this tale — of artist and muse, tourist and guide, wayward explorer and inward observer — into well-worn tropes or expected outcomes, even as it flirts with them. Just like Yan, who tells Soo-Ha he’s most drawn to places where he can key into people’s solitudes, “Winter in Sokcho” sketches out a world that allows for solitude to be the lens through which to understand its characters’ machinations. Even as it ends quite abruptly (and perhaps a bit too obtusely), this painterly portrait of fickle intimacy is quite engrossing, precisely because it avoids slotting its characters into recognizable and ready-made templates. Instead, like Yan’s own sketches and Soo-Ha’s imagined watercolor dreams, this a story that’s much more nebulous — mystifying even — but for that all the more admirable.