General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (오! 수정)

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (오! 수정, Oh! Soo-jung) is a 2000 South Korean black-and-white romantic comedy directed and written by Hong Sang-soo, his third feature film. It follows a love triangle between a young television writer, Soo-jung, and two men, her married boss Young-soo and his wealthy gallery-owner friend Jae-hoon, and retells the same events in five chapters from different points of view, with the characters' memories of what happened disagreeing.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and screenwriter	Hong Sang-soo (홍상수); his third feature, after The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996) and The Power of Kangwon Province (1998)¹
Cast	Lee Eun-ju as Soo-jung, Jeong Bo-seok as Jae-hoon, Moon Sung-keun as Young-soo³
Format	Black and white, 126 minutes (some listings give 127), Korean language⁴^•⁵
Structure	Five chapters: the first, third, and fifth cover the day Soo-jung is to surrender her virginity to Jae-hoon in a Seoul hotel; the longer second and fourth chapters reprise the relationship's beginnings, first from his point of view, then from hers¹
Korean release	May 27, 2000; rated 청소년 관람불가 (not for minors); 90,257 admissions recorded³
Festival honors	Un Certain Regard selection at the 2000 Cannes festival; Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival; Grand Bell Award for Best New Actress⁶^•⁷
Title source	The English title references Marcel Duchamp's work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even⁸

Spoilers

Story and structure

The three central characters are Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju), a 24-year-old writer for a cable television production company; Young-soo (Moon Sung-keun), her married boss, an independent filmmaker who attends the art exhibition of his wealthy junior Jae-hoon hoping for financial backing; and Jae-hoon (Jeong Bo-seok), a rich gallery owner who takes an interest in Soo-jung at a drinking party after the exhibition.¹^•³ In the synopsis given by the Korean database Cine21, Soo-jung, disappointed by Young-soo's ineffectual behavior, proposes to Jae-hoon that she will be his lover only when they drink together.³

The film is built on retelling with variation. Chapters one, three, and five chart the fateful day itself: Jae-hoon waits impatiently in a Seoul hotel room, Soo-jung hesitates but finally agrees to join him, and on the way she gets stuck in a stalled cable-car.¹ The longer second and fourth chapters reprise how the relationship began and developed, first from Jae-hoon's point of view and then from Soo-jung's. The two agree only that Young-soo introduced them; very little else tallies between their accounts.¹

The divergent memories carry the film's meaning. In one example discussed by the review site Film Inquiry, when Soo-jung stops Jae-hoon from going further, his version has him furious and dismissing her excuse, while her version has him calling her the wrong name in bed, which is why she refuses to continue.⁹ The festival writer Tony Rayns described the result as reinventing the romantic comedy "in Cubist terms," and the film's Korean title is a pun: the name Su-jeong usually means "crystal," but the word can also mean "fertilization."¹^•⁸

Production

Hong Sang-soo (born 1960 in Seoul) studied at Chung-Ang University before earning a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; he debuted with The Day a Pig Fell into the Well in 1996.¹⁰ Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors was his first comedy.⁴ It was also, according to a Film Inquiry retrospective, his last film made from a full script; afterward he moved to treatments and then to writing each day's pages the morning they were shot.⁹

The crew included Choi Young-taek (cinematography), Ham Sung-won (editing), and Ok Gil-sung (music); production companies were Miracin Korea (also rendered Mirashin Korea) with investment from Unikorea, and the producer was Lee Yu-jin.³^•⁴ According to IMDb trivia, the bulk of the movie was filmed in sequence, including multiple scenes set at the same location, which would normally be shot together for economy.¹¹

Release and reception

The film screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2000 Cannes festival.⁶ Release dates differ between sources: Cine21 and IMDb give the South Korean release as May 27, 2000, while Rotten Tomatoes lists a wide theatrical release of April 28, 2000.³^•¹¹^•¹² Cine21 records 90,257 admissions in Korea and a rating that barred minors.³

At the Tokyo International Film Festival the film received a Special Jury Prize and an Asian Film Award Special Mention, and it won Best New Actress at the Grand Bell Awards.⁷ Derek Malcolm, reviewing for Screen Daily in 2000, called it a romantic comedy touched with everyday realism rather than an erotic film, noting that it received a special jury award at Tokyo and was voted best film by the Pusan Film Critics.¹³ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a Tomatometer score of 71% from four reviews.¹²

Place in Hong Sang-soo's work

The film consolidated the reputation Hong had built with his first two features. The Korean Film Archive's retrospective notes states that with The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) and Oh! Soo-jung (2000) he became an unrivaled auteur in Korean cinema, supported absolutely by critics at home and abroad.¹⁴ Later scholarship treats the film as an exercise in deconstructing narrative structure, and critics have connected its contradictory retellings to postmodern readings of Korean cinema alongside Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy.¹⁵^•¹⁶ David Bordwell's Figures Traced in Light analyzes the film's staging, noting that Hong presents an entire dinner-table scene in an unmoving take lasting ninety-six seconds.¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026