Calista's Summer '77

Calista's latest effort, Summer '77, is a love story wrapped inside a mystery. Set in South Korea, the movie follows Song Ji-woo, a middle-aged teacher at a rural high school, as he searches for his missing daughter Soo-ji. Intermittently the movie jumps back in time to portray Song's romance with Soo-ji's mother, Jae-eun, which took place against the backdrop of the Korean War.

The movie deploys classic noir tropes, but it is not a playful pastiche. Soo-ji suffers from schizophrenia and Song suspects that she has fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous man she met at college in Busan. But Song's only evidence for this is a letter Soo-ji wrote before she disappeared, and as Song follows clues and interviews her friends and acquaintances, he comes to realize that reality is more complicated. Song doggedly follows up any hint he can find, however hopeless, sweating in the omnipresent heat of the Busan summer. (The weather is almost another character in the film, mentioned by everyone and visible in nearly every scene. From time to time the humidity boils up into violent thunderstorms that bring only temporary relief. Calista realizes the itchy, sweaty atmosphere so convincingly that the movie is almost physically uncomfortable to watch.)

In flashback scenes, Song is no less determined and monomaniacal in his pursuit of Jae-eun. The setting is the same—in the hot summer of 1950, both Song and Jae-eun have fled behind the Pusan Perimeter, the last desperate U.N. holdout against the invading Communists. Jae-eun seems likely to marry her suitor Park Chang-ho, who helped her and her parents flee to safety at considerable risk to himself. Park's heroism makes a persuasive case, but Song desperately begs Jae-eun to choose him instead. Eventually he succeeds, at some cost to his dignity, and in the shambles of war he and Jae-eun start a family.

Back in the 1970s, Song finally finds his daughter with the help of the man he had suspected of abducting her. Tomorrow Song will take Soo-ji back to the rural town where he lives, where Jae-eun is buried. He couldn't rescue Jae-eun's family from the invading Communists, he couldn't save her from cancer, and he knows the storms in Soo-ji's head will never go away. But tonight in Busan he has hired an air-conditioned hotel room he can't afford, and he and Soo-ji are out of the feverish heat. While she sleeps he strokes her back and remembers.