Song Sang-Soo's Korean comedy centres around a tangled love quartet comprised of a failed novelist, a water-filter salesman, his wife and a cinema ticket-seller. Eye level direction imparts an unsettling edge to familiar urban details, thus enabling the audience to place them­selves within the settings encountered. In their distinctive ways, each of the four characters rep­resents the generation of student activists whose hopes of social change are mired in numbing rou­tine.