Social chic. An American woman pays a clandestine lover to give her a child. Little by little she learns a sense of adventure.
For her first feature length film, Gina Kim, an American filmmaker of Korean origin, engages in virtuosic game of hide and go seek. It does not betray her film to reveal that it revolves around the issues of racism and social discrimination, but never ceasing to scramble these codes. With, and here's the key, an implacable constant: the rich always end up behaving like bastards, especially when they are not. Staring with the heroine of the film, played by the charming and diaphanous Vera Farmiga, who is exactly what she does not seem to be, that is a monster. A monster of selfishness, blindness and contempt.
Farmiga embodies the beautiful Sophia, the wife of a businessman of Korean origin, Andrew, who is certainly rich but sterile and on top of all violently depressed. However, the family of the young man is bigoted like a convent of Carmelites and considers it more or less the responsibility of the pour young blond woman who lies at the heart of this tormented situation. She has all that she needs, a rich husband, an apartment in Manhattan which could be a feature story in la Maison de Marie Claire, and plenty of free time in which to occupy herself, but now she lacks a child- that thing which makes a woman perfect in the eyes of all. Since this situation is one which is financially comfortable she decides to fight for the path, which she believes, is meant for her.
She finds a handsome young man, like her husband Korean but an illegal immigrant who works odd jobs to survive and send money to his family. She offers him a proposal: he must impregnate her at a price of $300 per visit and a bonus of $10,000 in the case of pregnancy.
The obscenity of the proposal is all the more striking in that it is made by a woman who believes she can save the love of her life without realizing she has struck upon the problem of the rich. The execution of the contract and the mechanics of the film are based on these embarrassing sexual encounters, and not solely for the actors. This woman, who desires nothing because she already has all ultimately finds herself in an obscure adventure and unexpected pleasure.
The sordid landscape of Chinatown, the threadbare tracksuit of her clandestine lover, desperate embraces between the dubious sheets... and finally the poverty, all these excite her in the same manner in which the bourgeois would once go slumming in such suspicious neighborhoods.
But of course, this flight of love will not last forever, instead causing severe damage. Gina Kim leaves you with the task of writing in the denouement of the story, with a final sequence of remarkable simplicity.
—Translated from French, Bruno Icher, (October 24, 2007)