The Sex-Positivity of Lee Hae-young’s FOXY FESTIVAL

Foxy Festival (simply titled Festival in Korea) is likely to be the cutest movie about sexual perversion that you see this year. In fact, this tale of sexual deviance in a neighbourhood of regular Korean citizens goes to some lengths to viagra to order establish the idea of perversion itself as outdated, quaint, uselessly conventional. Why? Because everyone is levitra vs viagra a pervert.

Director Lee Hae-young and editor Nam Na-yeong quickly establish a flitting, breezy pace for the film, which opens with a charming montage sequence depicting the six central characters engaged in the routines of their day-to-day lives. Subtle [and unsubtle] moments in the montage demonstrate the passions that backlight their outwardly dull lives: a handyman sucks his thumb lustfully after striking it accidentally with a hammer, the pain transporting him to a place of sexual pleasure. A young cop can’t stop screaming about his own sexual prowess as he relentlessly plows his bored girlfriend, who lies beneath him envisioning the vibrator that will soon enter her life and herself, bringing her the first pleasure she’s felt in ages.

Finding pleasure, in effect, is what this movie is really about—Lee Hae-young has no interest in plunging his viewers into an obsessive sexual world à la Blue Velvet. He even pulls back from the milder consequences of sexual exploration that we see in, say, 9 and 1/2 Weeks.  Foxy Festival is 100% sex-positive, a film that constantly emphasizes the idea that good sex = indulgence + humour. Even the humiliations presented in the film [which come in the form of arrests for public indecency, and a more enclosed but far more painful scene at the urinals when the cop, played by Ha-kyun Shin, discovers that he is not the guy with the biggest penis around anymore] are gentle, swathed in Lee Hae-young’s adult version of cotton candy comedic sweetness. The movie’s depiction of pleasure is reflected in its story-telling techniques; everything and virtually everyone onscreen is beautiful. Even scenes of abject pain are softened by humour, the same humour that finally leads the characters to pleasure—everyone gets laid, just the way they want to. Lee Hae-young’s alternately slapstick and delicate touch suggests that the process of attaining pleasure may be as emotionally complex in the microcosm of this Korean neighbourhood as it is in the sexual journeys depicted in far darker films, but the trip ends in sunny orgasms for all in Foxy Festival.

– Nathan Ripley

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FOXY FESTIVAL has its Canadian Premiere July 28^th at 9:45pm in the Hall viagra free samples Theatre with Lee Hae-young in person!  Full details on the film page HERE.

About the author:

Nathan Ripley

Nathan Ripley is a pen name of award-winning writer Naben Ruthnum. Published in QWERTY, The cialis from india White Rabbit Quarterly, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Maple Tree Literary Review, Dark Tales and more, Ruthnum is currently stacking up short stories and completing a pseudonymous thriller as Nathan Ripley.