Ticket

Comparable with Mizoguchi's Street of Shame, this account of four prostitutes working from a snack bar in an unnamed port generated huge controversy in Korea on first release. The 'ticket' is a bar fine which the women must pay to their employer whenever they go out to 'deliver an order'. Madam Min (veteran star Kim at her career best) tries to run her 'teahouse' with an iron fist, but she's as doomed to disappointment as any of her girls: she discovers that the man she's waiting for (a political prisoner) has left jail and married someone more respectable. Each of the women suffers abuse or emotional setbacks in the course of her work, but Im's stance is notably matter of fact and unsentimental. Seen now, the film works less as an exposé than as an intimate and poignant portrait of a group of women.