Splendid Outing: Soo-yong Kim

Soo-yong Kim's Splendid Outing hit me like a stick of dynamite. The film haunted my thoughts for days after I watched it. I could not get it out of my head. I earnestly believe that if it was given a proper restoration and promotion here in the States, it would be heralded as a triumph of world cinema. A feminist parable masquerading as a horror film (or perhaps the other way around), Splendid Outing tells the story of Gong Do-hui, a high-powered business executive and women's rights icon who is mistaken for the runaway wife of a rural fisherman by a group of hired thugs, kidnapped, and trapped on a distant island, and brutally beaten and raped by her "husband." The husband slobbers about as a barely coherent drunk with psychotic, sadistic tendencies. Her new "daughter" is a cripple who is quick to scream and cry (and incite her father's wrath upon Gong) whenever she feels neglected. But if the father is too stupid to notice that Gong isn't his missing wife,  the daughter almost certainly knows within an instant that Gong isn't her real mother. After several failed attempts, Gong manages to escape from the island after a year and return to the mainland. However, she discovers that the police have mistaken another dead woman for her. She also finds that she has been forgotten by the company that she once worked for. Indeed, one of the most painful moments of the film is when we realize that the company probably deliberately forgot about her because she was a woman who had the audacity to hold power over her male co-workers. With her children long since moved away and an unwanted baby in her belly, Gong kills herself while screaming her name one last time. And yet, this isn't the end of the film. I won't give away the ending, but it transforms an already exhaustive parable into an uneasy glance into the internalized masochism that perhaps infects many feminists. Another underlying theme in Splendid Outing is the complicity of many women in destructive patriarchal societies. A group of women kidnap Gong, the crippled daughter and her grandmother either encourage or deliberately provoke the husband's abusive behavior, and when she returns to the mainland she discovers that her feminist group has been hijacked by a woman who promotes a faith-based pro-life agenda. I can't remember the last time a film so violently shook me to my core. Splendid Outing is a nightmarish Korean response to Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Woman in the Dunes (1964). But whereas that film depicts its protagonist's imprisonment in an exploitative society as an accidental twist of fate, Splendid Outing argues that such imprisonment not only can happen, but does happen to millions upon millions of women all over the world.

9/10