Waves

2021

Narrative Feature Film

Three gay men of different identities and ages face the separation and waiting in their respective lives and relationships.

Homosexuals in South Korea are fraught with a variety of contradictions in their social and personal lives. Yet these contradictions are made insoluble, even inevitable, by herd mentality and timidity. It is like the waves of the sea, a cycle that goes back and forth. This is the reason for the title of the film, "Waves".

The film revolves around a gay novel caled Waves. The three main characters in the film meet because of the book and also each enact the story of parting and waiting in the book. The three main characters are both the readers and the WRITER s of the book. The film can therefore also be described as a visualisation of the book. Furthermore, the film is rarely explicitly critical, but merely presents the complexities of human nature to the audience.

The everyday situations are repeated over and over again, showing the pains of people's lives and the instability of human emotions. There is a lot of improvisation, dialogue and subtle capture of life's details. The film uses simple images to explore the deeper nature of life, replicating reality with images and then summarising it. There are many long shots and doly shots in the film, with an observational perspective on affairs, desire, life and death, and moral

dilemmas. The film draws on both realistic aesthetics and new wave aesthetics to create a kind of aesthetics of “distance”, while the film's minimalist style leaves room for imagination. In addition，the film is divided into three parts through three main characters, the end of each part being the beginning of the next The concept of time is blurred in the film. These three parts are strung together from beginning to end, making the whole film a cycle. It is like a kind of cycle of life. The stories of the three people are each other’s past and future. Through this structural innovation, it breaks the traditional human mindset of a linear narrative and alows the audience to dissect the psychology of the characters in the drama from different perspectives. The dislocation of time and space in the film, the use of repetition and difference, alows causality to be replaced by chance, giving the film a more mysterious dimension. The emphasis on structural formality and the exploration of the latent desires and insecurities of the human heart make this film extremely typical of these characteristics and their fundamental contradictions and the dislocations they create, both in form and content.