Summertime (2001 film)

Summertime
Korean name
Hangul	썸머타임
Revised Romanization	Sseommeotaim
McCune–Reischauer	Ssŏmmŏtaim
Directed by	Park Jae-ho
Written by	Yu Gap-yeol
Based on	Scorpio Nights by Peque Gallaga
Produced by	Cha Seung-jae
Starring	Ryu Soo-young Kim Ji-hyun
Cinematography	Shin Hyun-joong
Edited by	Park Soon-duk
Music by	Um In-ho
Release date	May 26, 2001 (2001-05-26)
Running time	103 minutes
Country	South Korea
Language	Korean

Summertime (Korean: 썸머타임; RR: Sseommeotaim) is a 2001 South Korean film directed by Park Jae-ho and starring Ryu Soo-young and Kim Ji-hyun. A remake of the controversial Philippine film Scorpio Nights (1985), the film was also inspired by the Gwangju massacre.

Plot

Set in the 1980s, Sang-ho is a student activist hiding out in a small rural village. He accidentally witnesses, through a hole on the floor of his second story room, a married couple having sex. He discovers he is a voyeur at heart and becomes bolder and bolder in his actions. One day, he gets an opportunity to play out his fantasies. When the husband is not home, Sang-ho goes downstairs. Imitating the husband's manner of foreplay even down to the sequence, the young man has sex with the wife. She, like Sang-ho, is a prisoner of the house. The second time he comes to her, he touches her in a different way which makes her turn around and discover that there is a stranger in her bed. But this does not deter her as she reaches out to him for an intense embrace. The husband, Tae-yeol, is an ex-policeman fired for alleged corruption, and his wife Hee-ran, who was raped by him as a young girl, for the sake of status quo has ended up as his wife and prisoner.

Cast

• Ryu Soo-young as Sang-ho
• Kim Ji-hyun as Hee-ran
• Choi Cheol-ho as Tae-yeol
• Song Ok-sook as Gi-ok
• Bae Jeong-yun as Young-mi
• Choi Seong-min
• Yun Yeong-keol
• Jang Seong-won
• Kim Seon-hwa
• Lee Seung-hun
• Ahn Byeong-kyeong
• Park Hoon-jung as child in the playground

Casting and production

Initially, an audition was held to cast the female lead, and a friend of Kim Ji-hyun's brother heard about it. The friend recommended Kim for the role over the phone, and she was given the script for the movie. Receiving the script, Kim was resistant to its explicit content, but she was touched by the storyline and chose Summertime as her first role. In preparation for the role, she viewed erotic films such as Last Tango in Paris and In the Realm of the Senses, and read news articles and books depicting the 1980s, the time period in which the film was set. Ryu Soo-young, the film's male lead, was also a first-time movie actor, though he had experience appearing on TV dramas. He came to star in Summertime because his manager was close with the film's producer, and at the time staff needed more male actors. Ryu was also reluctant to star in the film, but he accepted after the director urged him it was not just "people taking off their clothes." For the movie, he took on a strenuous diet consisting of only one meal a day.

Filming took place inside sets in Yangsu-ri, Gyeonggi Province, in November 2000. The actors filmed the majority of erotic scenes without covering their genitals or employing substitute actors. According to Ryu Soo-young in a 2012 episode of Radio Star, the movie's script was substantially cut to fit its run time.

External links

• Summertime at the Korean Movie Database (in Korean)
• Summertime at IMDb
• Summertime at HanCinema