A Girl Who Looks Like the Sun

One of the strangest and most luminous films of the Korean 1970s, from one of Korean cinema’s great humanist directors. A young woman on her way to the sea meets a man suspected of murder, and what follows blows past the rules of both romance and thriller. Rock legend Shin Joong-hyun’s score, kicked off by the soaring title track, gives the film a buoyancy that never quite disappears—even as the plot tightens around its characters. Shin Seong-il plays the fugitive with coiled, star-wattage intensity, but the film belongs to Moon Sook (in her film debut), whose character dances in a Namsan amphitheater, pops open a red umbrella in the rain, and moves through the film the way the music does: lightly, on her own terms, against the grain of everything. The “sun” of the title is less a metaphor for innocence than a reminder of the warmth—and burn—of idealization. Digitally mastered in 2022 by the Korean Film Archive.