O Sole Mio, a South Korean short film that illuminates the relationship between sex and power in Korean media, maintain its funny, awkward, and horrific tension through its utter aesthetic sparseness. The camera barely moves, and the film only contains a handful of shots, but this only serves to make the film tenser and starker in its critique of business practices. In the film’s opening moments, women wait edgily outside an office door for an interview. After one woman angrily leaves the interview room, the film’s protagonist, Jisun, enters the office but admits quickly that she already knows the interview, with whom she had earlier traded a job for sexual favors. Despite insinuating that she’s there for another interview, she instead attempts to enact revenge against the potential employer that screwed her over.
The entire film plays on the absurd conventions of masculinity. The early tension in the waiting area is made even more awkward when an older man tells a younger man that he can hook him up with one of the women. The younger man’s even more awkward reply speaks to the cognitive dissonance that men seem to have when thinking about women as employees, friends, family, and, of course, sex objects.
In particular, the boss/interviewer—who we learn is stepping out on his heiress wife with the prospective employees—is gloriously smarmy with a half-grown mustache and a kind of ethereal greasiness. His small, troll-like physique and lecherous ogling produce a ridiculous image of male desire, one that is deftly contrasted by the female interviewee’s calm disgust. In a sense, the boss is an absurd stereotype of lecherous bosses, made even funnier by his youth contrasted with his old man clothing. He is a boy playing the role of a powerful, lascivious man, and failing terribly.
While film’s style is explicitly minimalistic, the small hallway, painful fluorescent lights, and negligible props only serve to emphasize this film’s image as a corporate sexual harassment film gone horribly one. What is explicitly significant here is that it is not only the film’s main protagonist that has been the recipient of masculine power—the interviewer’s wife and the other prospective interviewees are also enclosed within this particular power game. And, because the film is so short and has such little dialogue, the surfeit of power relations within such a brief window of time exposes their prevalence in the media/corporate sphere. Although very few words are spoken in the film, Jisun’s obvious disgust, the interviewer’s grotesque leering, the wife’s rage, and the other women’s horror speak to the constant, endemic sexual inequalities that forever frame women’s relationships to the professional world.