The Empty Dream
Korean Cinema’s Golden Decade: The 1960s
September 1 - 17, 2023
A young man and woman under anesthesia for oral surgery meet in a shared dream and fall into an increasingly bizarre love triangle with their dentist in Yu Hyun-mok’s lusty and sinister headtrip of a film.
A young man and woman under anesthesia for oral surgery meet in a shared dream and fall into an increasingly bizarre love triangle with their dentist. So begins Yu Hyun-mok’s lusty and sinister headtrip of a film, which takes Tetsuji Takechi’s pink film Daydream as its jumping-off point and playfully nods to Yu’s own tooth-ached protagonist in Aimless Bullet while becoming something altogether unclassifiable. A nearly wordless mashup of Freudian ideas played out on strikingly stylized sets, loosely connected by a referential, oddball soundtrack ranging from Johann Strauss’s “On the Blue Danube” to the theme song of René Clément’s pulpy Joy House, The Empty Dream is a wildly imaginative surrealistic gem ripe for rediscovery. Digitally mastered in 2022 by the Korean Film Archive.
For $30, receive one ticket to this film and a select menu item at Café Paradiso, located in FLC’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Learn more about our Dinner + Movie combo here.
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