Sharp as a brush
Chihwaseon (in french Drunken of women and painting, what a title!) didn't derserve its Best Director Prize in Cannes. It should have won Best Editing. Because if there's something remarkable in the movie it's the editing: the movie cuts sharply the situations before they're getting developped. This way, it manages to recover the way of painting creation: these are just sketches from situations, they aren't always achieved but it's through unachieved sketches that the creation of painter Oh Won is progressing. And for the rest, Im Kwon Taek is filming lovemaking in a sensual way which can only be compared with Imamura Shohei, Choi Min Sik gives an excellent Michel Simon-like performance and even is the explanation of the link between the birth of an art and troubled historical circumstances is not achieved (done much better by Andrei Roublev which was focusing on the religious advance of the painter) the movie has geat moments: the sex scenes of course, the scenes showing painting as a violence on the picture for example. It might not be a masterpiece but it's innovative and worth seeing.
