The Power of Kangwon Province

The beauty of Korea’s Kangwon region—a popular getaway for Seoul urbanites—desperately competes with the vainglory of its visitors in Hong’s almost philosophical diptych on modern love and loneliness. In one episode, a college student travels to escape her affair with a married man . . . only to fall for a married man. In the second, a married professor leaves his family to visit with his friend, with similarly unhappy—and alcohol-fueled—results. Haunting the borders, though, is a third, more tragic tale, whose tragedy is only revealed later. “There is no escape from Korea,” Hong wrote—or from ourselves.