Directed by South Korean filmmaker Su-won Shin, "Circle Line" is a remarkable short film, in the sense that it manages to harmoniously mix genres as disparate as social commentary (the inhumanity of the working world), psychological study (the impact of unemployment on the psyche of an executive invested in his work) and pure fantasy (the obsessions of the hero, Sang-woo).
The starting point of "Circle Line" is the dismissal of a 40-year-old executive. Unemployed for some time, he has not dared talk about it to his wife and his teenage daughter. Like others before him, he has been playing the comedy of work, pretending to go to the office in the morning and to return late at night. The truth is that the dejected man, deprived of one of his reasons for living and humiliated by the fact that he will soon no longer be able to guarantee his family's daily comfort, spends his time in the Seoul subway, going in circles from train to train on the aptly named Circle Line.
If the film were reduced to this, it would already be interesting, but it is even more interesting when we know that Sang-woo's wife, who is nine months pregnant, is about to give birth. One more mouth to feed is a problem, not to say a torment, and, in his daze, all the husband has to say to his wife the morning she tells him her water is about to break is that the baby shouldn't be born now, that it had better wait.
From then on, Sang-woo's questless subway odyssey becomes a very destabilizing guilt trip. Not only will he not be able to ensure a good life for this baby, but he bitterly reproaches himself (without being able to do otherwise) for letting his wife down on the probable day of her delivery. Soon the irrational interferes in his perception of things: he sees pregnant women everywhere, his wife is suddenly lying on the bench face to him. He is also obsessed with his office, where during a visit to return his badge, he is greeted with indifference by his ex-colleagues. In his confusion, he soon sees himself playing rock-paper-scissors with his replacement... on the edge of a station platform, at the risk of falling on the tracks and ending up crushed. He also has problems with a young beggar girl who asks for a handout to feed her baby. Crossing paths with her several times in harrowing scenes, whether real or fantasized, he finds himself confronted with the very embodiment of the anxieties he is going through.
Rarely has the distress of a man who has suddenly lost his bearings been shown with such intensity. And also with such subtlety and such an economy of means. No shocking scenes, everything is suggested, leaving the spectator to deduce the reality of things from the clues that she sows throughout his journey to nowhere. She does not explain anything, letting the spectator deduce the reality of things, which is different from the one perceived by the main character. The fact that almost all the action takes place underground (the few escapes to the outside actually only serve to reinforce Sang-woo's trouble) really makes sense, suggesting the poor man's inward-looking attitude. Sang-woo is indeed locked in because of his sterile denial: the solution to his problems can no more come out of his head than the fetus from his wife's swollen belly).
Cold colors, In-gi Jeong, an actor perfectly expressing Sang-woo's moral and mental disorders and inspired editing plunge the viewer into a bizarre feeling, at the same time pitying and condemning the hero . This is assuredly not a feel-good movie but in a way it does give you good vibrations, not generated by the story itself naturally but by the ability of the filmmaker, a brilliant creator, to talk to us finely about serious things, from adult to adult, from accomplished artist to demanding spectator.
