[Les Inrockuptibles]

Published February 2007 - Source

By Serge Kaganski, Translated from French

A modern melodrama in which sex, emotions, and politics are finely interwoven.

Married to Andrew, an American of Korean descent, materially comfortable and emotionally fulfilled, Sophie has only one (major) problem: the couple is unable to conceive a child, apparently due to the husband’s weak sperm. She therefore decides — without telling anyone — to achieve her goal by paying Jihah, an undocumented Korean immigrant, to sleep with her. Why is it initially difficult to fully enter the film? Perhaps because the premises of the script seem somewhat forced. Sophie could talk with her husband, agree to adopt, or make use of a sperm donation. Granted, the husband’s Korean family is deeply religious and relies strictly on prayer, but one still wonders whether a well-off, integrated New York man in his forties might not overcome the traditions and beliefs of his community.

The viewer is also kept at a distance by a sometimes icy mise-en-scène and stylistic devices (an abundance of mirrors, fragmented images meant to convey Sophie’s inner dilemmas). One may think these are excessive mannerisms. Yet little by little—much like the evolution of the relationship between Sophie and Jihah, which gradually shifts from a form of prostitution to a love affair—the film draws the viewer in and unfolds a dense layering of meanings and emotions. At its heart pulses the classic love triangle, and Gina Kim is careful to render none of the three protagonists culpable, avoiding any negative portrayal of Andrew, the husband who is “betrayed” on two counts. 

Never Forever is also the story of a woman who evolves from a passive wife into a warrior who conquers her freedom, independence, and control over her body and destiny in the face of social norms and conventions. This subtle feminism is reinforced by the film’s covert treatment of integration and undocumented immigration. The political dimension also emerges through dramaturgical choices that reverse familiar assumptions: it is a woman who is the heroine and driving force of the narrative; it is a woman who pays a man to sleep with her (making her at once victim and predator); and their relationship unsettles the white bourgeois order that exploits an undocumented immigrant while benefiting from his precarious status—only to be transformed again when feelings emerge.

As in Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley, emotions and sex (and politics) are intimately entwined here, as Sophie becomes genuinely attached to Jihah when he makes love to her in a new, gentler — more affectionate — way. These episodes, marked by a very contemporary and coherent sexual frankness, belong to a tradition of classic American melodrama that John Stahl or Douglas Sirk might once have filmed. Almost imperceptibly, the cards of couplehood, masculinity and femininity, social class, and otherness are all reshuffled in this modern melodrama—patiently constructed and sensitive up to its open ending—finding a fine balance between emotional warmth and stylistic distance, carried throughout by the superb and unsettling face of Vera Farmiga, a landscape unto itself.