An artisan cafe in a quiet however stylish neighborhood of Seoul serves because the setting for a quartet of seasonal vignettes in Kim Jong-kwan’s romantic anthology “The Desk: Day and Night time.” Opening this 12 months’s Busan Movie Competition, the movie — with its star-studded ensemble together with Kim Min-ha, Shim Eun-kyung and Han Solar-hwa — will present a glitzy curtain-raiser for South Korea’s premier cinema occasion, however past this high-profile debut, Kim’s frothy, charming effort will probably meet a muted response additional afield, restricted solely to specialty Asian showcases.
An growth of the director’s 2016 effort, “The Desk,” which noticed 4 totally different {couples} meet for espresso on the similar desk, in the identical cafe, over the course of a single day, “The Desk: Day and Night time” is equally constructed round 4 probability encounters that happen in a single elegant cafe. This time, the encounters span a number of weeks, as the warmth of summer season slowly cools into fall, whereas the interludes themselves try and deal with one thing extra complicated than easy relationship points.
The primary chapter, titled “A Midsummer Night time’s Dream,” particulars the magical encounter between two prospects, Hyeon-oh (Joo Jong-hyuk), a younger man with a ardour for rebuilding previous watches, and Yoo-jin (Kim Min-ha), a determined dreamer, whose inherited vintage watch hasn’t labored in years. “Nonetheless Ourselves,” the second vignette, walks a precarious line between the comedian and the tragic, when Younger-min (Chang Ryul) is accosted by the attractive however more and more unstable Sang-mi (Han Solar-hwa), a former school good friend who accuses him of not remembering her, earlier than begging him to guard her from an invading invisible enemy.
Within the third story, “TPA,” profitable net novelist Hye-jin (Shim Eun-kyung) is courted by Dong-nam (Lee Hee-jun), a passionate filmmaker who asks her permission to adapt one among his hottest works for the large display, whereas within the ultimate story, an aspiring pop idol, Nakyung (Jeon So-young) and her childhood boyfriend Jong-su (Kim Dong-hwi) talk about the destiny of their teenage relationship.
Kim has continued to develop in stature inside the trade, since his acclaimed 2004 brief movie “Easy methods to Use a Polaroid Digicam.” He has contributed to various anthologies and omnibuses, together with the Netflix undertaking “Persona” (2019) and the Hemingway-inspired crime assortment “The Killers” (2024), whereas a lot of his characteristic movies, comparable to “Worst Lady” (2016) and “Frosted Window” (2025), are additionally structured round a sequence of loosely related vignettes.
He’s clearly drawn to telling tales in snapshots and exploring characters via fleeting moments and fleeting interactions. The perpetually populated tables of a bustling city restaurant present the proper setting for these micro-dramas to play out, whereas lending narrative coherence to the piece as a complete, even because the tone of every story can swing wildly, from the implausible to the pragmatic, from the fantastical to the coquettish.
By no means permitting the motion to spill past the confines of the institution, Kim invitations options that the café itself performs the position of Cupid to these fortunate sufficient to cross its threshold—a notion made all of the extra believable when novelist Hye-jin begins casually concocting a office romance from her personal creativeness, between the café’s omnipresent baristas. As is the case all through Kim’s work, the ladies show to be infinitely extra fascinating protagonists than their male counterparts.
Kim Min-ha, a well-recognized face to many from her work on Apple TV’s “Pachinko,” will get few alternatives to shine in a section that guarantees a lot however leaves its potential unexplored. Shim (final seen in Sho Miyake’s Locarno-winning “Two Seasons, Two Strangers”) portrays Hye-jin as a formidable artist, assured in her imaginative and prescient and stature inside a male-dominated trade, at the same time as she permits Dong-nam’s allure offensive to achieve traction. Han’s Sang-mi is an equally charming presence on display, a bundle of nervous vitality on the verge of exploding, captured brilliantly by one among Korea’s most versatile rising skills.
Grasp photographer Kim Ji-yong, the person answerable for such ravishing visible delights as Park Chan-wook’s “Choice to Go away” and Lee Chang-dong’s present participant “Doable Love,” pictures this hipster hideaway with Lee Ju-yeon, in heat, inviting hues that approximate the odor of freshly roasted beans. The partitions are adorned with eye-catching oil work depicting enigmatic, determined people who’re made up a lot the identical because the cafe’s actual clientele.
As for whether or not these portraits depict former prospects, whose tales as soon as unfolded over these similar steaming cups, Kim declines to remark. One can not help however assume, because the movie ends with a montage of empty, inviting tables, that he’s a storyteller extra within the potential of this house to host numerous compelling moment-to-moment characters, dramas, and romances than in doing justice to these he delivered to life.