Traces of Love

Director: Kim Dae-seung Kim Dae-seung

Overview

The inexplicable, real-life collapse of a Seoul department store back in 1995 serves as the catalyst for this tale of a grief-stricken lawyer who must learn to love again after losing it all. Law student Choi Hyeon-woo (Yu Ji-tae) and television director Seo Min-ju (Kim Ji-su) were the perfect couple - he having earned the respect of her old-fashioned parents and she a quick-witted beauty with a sunny disposition. Though their fulgent future together was soon to be cemented in marriage, fate dealt Choi and Seo a cruel hand when a popular Seoul department store simply folded in on itself one day, instantly snuffing out the radiant young beauty as her soul-shattered fianc?e watched helplessly from across the street. Flash forward ten years later, and though he may have a successful career as a public prosecutor Choi has yet to recover from his devastating loss. As Choi struggles to comprehend the corruption that forces him to drop the case he was just about to close, panic prone Yun Se-jin (Eom Ji-weon) does her best to cope with the anxiety that prevents her from living up to her full potential. Strangely, Yun was always in the background of Choi and Seo's lives. When Yun and Choi meet by chance on the very same island where Choi and Seo were set to honeymoon, it begins to appear as if fate may not be as casually cruel as lovelorn lawyer Choi was once lead to believe.

Product Details

Release Date:	09/30/2014
UPC:	0886470446223
Original Release:	2006
Source:	Asian Crush Mod
Language:	English
Time:	1:48:00
Sales rank:	65,762

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Kim Ji-su	Actor
Eom Ji-weon	Actor
Jo Yeong-wook	Composer

Technical Credits

Jang Min-seok

Kim Dae-seung	Director
Jang Min-seok	Screenwriter
Ahn Dong-gyu	Producer
Lee Tae-gyu	Sound/Sound Designer
Lee Seung-cheol	Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

After the gorgeous, somber period mystery of Blood Rain, director Kim Dae-seung returns to the type of swooning, star-crossed romance that marked his debut, Bungie Jumping of Their Own, for Traces of Love. Not that Traces of Love doesn't have its own sense of mystery, but astute viewers will ascertain the connection between the characters fairly quickly. While it lacks the paranormal aspect (and the gender-role complexity) of Bungie Jumping, Traces similarly conveys a fully realized sense of loss and longing, and offers a possible salve to all that pain which has an analogously unlikely purity. Where a Hollywood director might see the horrific and tragic real-life collapse of a crowded department store as inspiration for a disaster movie or a suspense-filled rescue drama, Kim finds an emotional core to the tale by focusing on the fictionalized event's deeply traumatic emotional impact on a few individuals. The film features fine performances from its three leads, Kim Ji-su (This Charming Girl), Uhm Ji-won (Tale of Cinema) and especially Yu Ji-tae (Oldboy), who makes Hyun-woo's transformation from a happy-go-lucky doofus to a wounded, driven workaholic fully believable. Cinematographer Lee Mo-gae captures the gorgeous locales of Woohee Island with aplomb, but the film's real strength is in the subtle compassion of Kim's direction, working from a script by Jang Min-seok. Traces of Love, which had its North American premiere at the 2007 New York Asian Film Festival, could easily have been a good melodramatic South Korean tearjerker, but Kim's clearheaded and sensitive, moving but not manipulative approach serves the material much better.