there is a graphic match with two traumatic occurances, his first interrogation where his hands are full of *beep* and then when his hands are wet with blood from the girl he accidentally killed.
she says his hands show kindness.
in that particular scene where he rejects her, watch how he looks at his hands, the shame, the sadism and msaochism, how he uses his hands to show sunim how disgusting he is.
its about innocence lost, guilt and a shame he cannot forgive. he cant go back to sunim, he's a different man.
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camouflage_s
16 years ago
Hey...ok i love this innocence lost experience thing..but i kind of interpreted it differently when i saw it...remember the scene where sunim comes to meet him at the military base and she is unable to meet him...on her way back youngho's army van passes by her...and the othher soldiers kind of tease her...and she smiles unaware that young ho is watching her....and the anguish in young ho's face at wht a terrible sight he has just seen....
he had built a layer of illusionary perfection around her...which is shattered....by that smile of sunim..which kind of apparently presents her as characterless...and open to other men's machoism too...
reminds me of leo tolstoy's after the dance..where the boy loses love for a girl just because he sees her father who is a colonel cruelly beat up a probable traitor....
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BruceUK
15 years ago
I didn't see it that way at all. He looks anguished simply because he recognises her, realises she must have come a long way to visit him and yet can't do anything about it since they are driving away.
I didn't read anything into her smiling at the soldiers when they call out to her - it was just an amused smile at their raucous behaviour.
It's a wonderful film. There are little subtle touches that I only picked up on a second and third viewing. For example, when he rejects Sunim in the cafe, a tear runs down from her right eye, and this is repeated in the hospital just after he has walked away from her bedside after seeing her for the last time.
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lomovsky
13 years ago
... what a sad reality this world is :(
I just watched the movie yesterday. ahhhhhh...........
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rontant
13 years ago
It's a good movie but it's simply too depressing for me to watch it again for the second time. I still can't understand how one could be so cruel to cut off his true love just like that because of the guilts which has nothing to do with her whatsoever.
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tvandfilmbuff
11 years ago
She was still the sweet, innocent girl he fell in love with. She thought he was the same boy she fell in love with. He knew he had changed and no longer deserved someone as good as her. It's all in that hand scene -- where she said he has such kind hands. He knew the sins his hands had performed, and symbolically, at that moment when she mentioned his kind hands, they were still reeking with the smell from one of his deeds. He no longer felt worthy of her.
"I might be a Gung-Fu expert... but I need cash!"
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