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Four very different intimate encounters occur in Room 407 of Motel Cactus, a Seoul 'love hotel'. In Summer, the first episode, a woman seeks to spend her birthday with the man she loves, but he has very different plans. Autumn concerns a pair of young college students who surprise themselves when they have sex while supposedly working on an assignment for their filmmaking class. In Winter, an older couple meet while getting drunk and embark on a marathon love making session which culminates in the trashing of the room. Finally, two former lovers go to the hotel after a funeral and find they have both changed too much for a reconciliation.
The four vignettes of passion are interconnected by the ways in which each character relates to the same physical environment: Room 407. Visually, Park's framing of the action within the closed bounds of one room lend a potent, expressive, taut quality to the film's drama. The predominant relationship with the outside world comes in the form of riot police battling demonstrators, mobile phones and other modern electronic gadgets. Their distant sounds serve as reminders of the external strains of Korea's modern political realities.
Park's sense of cinematic tension is complimented by sharp cinematography by Australian lens veteran, Christopher Doyle, known for his work with Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Wong Kar-Wai. Motel Cactus is a film imbued with wisdom and delicate sensitivity which easily breezes past the bounds of its physical space.
Park Ki-Yong was born in 1961 in South Korea. He graduated from Seoul Institute for the Arts and the Korean Academy of Film Arts. Motel Cactus received the New Currents Award at the 1997 Pusan Festival in South Korea, and a Special Mention Tiger Award at this year's Rotterdam International Film Festival.