The Movie Moon 1/4
The opening stretch of the film moved at a brisk clip.
As Ryu Yeon-woo and Hong A-yun slipped into Cha Su-hyeon and Hong Yu-jeong, trading rapid-fire banter back and forth, the audience swallowed hard and locked onto the screen.
Having watched, as observers, the entire chain of events that had brought Hong Yu-jeong into the past, the audience understood exactly the situation she now found herself in.
From the departing space probe, through the Ferris wheel in her dream, all the way to Cha Su-hyeon's house.
"Ah, so this is just another manifestation of my subconscious. That's why a handsome guy keeps saying everything I want to hear."
"…She is genuinely not right in the head."
From the audience's vantage point—armed with every scrap of information—the conversation between two protagonists who each held only incomplete pieces of the puzzle drew genuine laughter.
Soon after, Hong Yu-jeong's inner voice came through in narration as she discovered her mother's necklace caught around her throat.
Watching her finally begin to grasp that this was neither a dream nor a psychotic break, the audience sensed that the story was about to begin in earnest.
"The nearest police box from here is farther than you'd think. Let's take that bike."
Before long the two of them had come down the mountain path with a lantern and climbed onto a battered silver bicycle, and installation artist Yoon Ha-neul's eyes began to move restlessly across the screen.
Even in the thick of preparing a solo exhibition, Yoon Ha-neul had pulled every string she had to secure a ticket to this premiere.
And the reason was this very scene—the one that had also become the film's poster.
Aesthetically perfect…
A quiet summer country road at night, nothing but the croaking of frogs in the dark.
Along that road, the silver bicycle carrying Ryu Yeon-woo and Hong A-yun crept slowly forward, guided only by the faint glow of a lantern.
Most of the audience would simply drown in the beauty of the imagery and the actors' faces.
And of course, that was the right way to watch a movie—intuitively, without overthinking.
Still, arranging visual elements like these—mise-en-scène—was Yoon Ha-neul's entire field, and she could feel exactly what Director Lee Yong-su intended by framing the two actors in a long shot.
Like a comet cutting across the night sky. Or, in this film, maybe a space probe.
Using the silver bicycle, the shot was visually implying that Hong Yu-jeong's traveling companion had shifted—from her fellow astronauts to Cha Su-hyeon.
Watching the same scene, Yeon-woo himself arrived at the same realization as Yoon Ha-neul.
He hadn't noticed it during the shoot, but looking at the finished product, it clicked.
Ah. So that's why the director insisted we had to do a drone shot.
At the time he had wondered what difference a drone would make when it was night and everything was dark anyway—but the director had never intended to show the surrounding landscape in any detail.
If anything, the sight of the two figures advancing along a dim, blurred country road unconsciously shortened the psychological distance between the audience and the protagonists.
Whether a viewer caught the hidden meaning of the shot or not had nothing to do with feeling that closeness.
As expected of a giant in the commercial film world. Nobody controls an audience's emotions through pure visual beauty the way he does.
Two days had passed since they discovered that a blue veil, visible only to Hong Yu-jeong, encircled the village—and that she could not go beyond it.
At first Cha Su-hyeon had dismissed it as nonsense, but only after pushing and pulling at Hong Yu-jeong himself did he finally accept that an invisible barrier hung in empty air.
"So you're saying you came from the future…?"
"You asked me yesterday, and this is already the third time today."
"Come on, it's just too hard to believe."
Hong Yu-jeong shook her head at that.
"It's just as hard for me to believe."
Cha Su-hyeon sat on the edge of the wooden veranda, staring blankly out at the front yard, then spoke again.
"Hmm. Then that settles it. At least one thing is certain."
Hong Yu-jeong looked at him, thrown by the non sequitur.
"What is?"
"I'm definitely the older one. You said you were born in '96. I was born in '86."
"……."
She stared at him with an expression of pure disbelief, then let out a short laugh.
In a way, he might have been the first person in Earth's history to meet someone from the future—and that was what he cared about?
Absurd as the remark was, it snapped the tension that had been winding her thoughts to the breaking point. The tightness drained out of her all at once.
"No way. Even if the birth years say that, I was originally thirty. I'm the older sister here."
"But you were still born ten years after me."
"Then let's be fair and use formal speech with each other."
Cha Su-hyeon nodded.
"Understood-yo. Shall we eat lunch-yo."
"…Never mind."
And so began a cohabitation that had never been part of either of their life plans.
Hong Yu-jeong had no choice but to adapt to the situation she had been given.
She had considered contacting the government or some institution, but cold-calling them would, at best, get her treated like a psychiatric case.
She had even snatched his chocolate-bar flip phone and tried calling the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, only to hear a message that the number did not exist.
"Well, right now KARI is probably busy launching the Arirang-2 satellite I only ever saw in textbooks. The agency and the people in it aren't the KARI I know."
And even if the call had gone through, even if the government had believed her—what would change?
Time travel was a realm even future technology could not dream of touching.
"Ugh. I just need to adapt faster."
She was sighing when Cha Su-hyeon's voice floated in from the kitchen.
"Come eat. The sujebi's done."
"Coming!"
Still—if that man hadn't been here, she would have been in real trouble.
She grumbled on the surface, but the more she thought about it, the more grateful she felt.
Within the range she could travel, there was only Cha Su-hyeon's house where she was currently freeloading, a mountain with almost no hikers, and Yeongjin Super—the little store that sat right on the boundary of the veil, which they had visited on the bicycle last time.
And even the store—I can only go into half of it.
It was a hole-in-the-wall shop the size of a postage stamp. She could reach the counter where the elderly owner sat and the ice cream freezer, but the shelves with the ramen and coffee were cut off by the blue barrier that sliced the store cleanly in two.
How did I end up like this…
Hong Yu-jeong ladled sujebi into a bowl and let out a long sigh.
And Cha Su-hyeon watched her quietly.
In his eyes, Hong Yu-jeong seemed to wither a little more each day under the weight of her depression.
The next day, Cha Su-hyeon was fussing with something on the veranda.
Hong Yu-jeong, who had spent the entire morning alone in her room lost in thought, opened the door and found him there.
"Su-hyeon, what are you doing?"
"Oh, you're up?"
He held up two paper cups linked by a length of red string.
"…A paper-cup telephone?"
Hong Yu-jeong tilted her head.
Wasn't that the kind of "mommy science project" mothers made for little kids?
Cha Su-hyeon grinned, stood up, and fed the string through the crack of her door all the way into his own room, stretching it taut.
"Our communication system. If you get bored at night, call me. I don't have whatever that smartphone thing is you keep talking about, but I'll always pick up this phone."
The sheer absurdity of it made her snort.
"You think this will actually work? The distance is pretty far."
"You're a scientist and you have no faith in science? Go in your room."
She tilted her head again and went inside.
Whether it worked or not, watching Cha Su-hyeon try so hard to lift her spirits peeled away one layer of the gloom that had settled over her.
"Aaaah—can you hear me?"
She pressed the cup to her ear, and Cha Su-hyeon's voice came through with surprising clarity.
Eyes wide, Hong Yu-jeong put the cup to her mouth and shouted.
"Yeah! I can hear you! It works way better than I thought!"
She brought it back to her ear, and his voice returned.
"See? Told you it works. How can a scientist not know something like this?"
A smile finally touched her face.
"Hey, scientists don't know everything. I've never even seen a paper-cup phone before."
"Yeah. First time I've made one, too."
It wasn't much, but that day they talked about everything under the sun until the sun went down, switching the cup between mouth and ear.
Even though he was only in the next room, not facing each other made it feel like a real phone call with a friend.
"…So after my parents died in the accident, I was selected as a science prodigy and grew up as an astronaut and researcher with support from the state and the foundation."
"Then somewhere out there right now, there's a little science-prodigy Hong Yu-jeong?"
"I don't know. I've thought about it, and she probably exists. But if I interfere with young Hong Yu-jeong's life, there's no telling what could happen, so I have to stay away."
There was a famous thought experiment called the grandfather paradox.
If someone went back in time and shot their own grandfather, could that person ever have been born?
The contradiction itself was usually cited as an argument against the possibility of time travel.
But Hong Yu-jeong had already time-traveled, so the paradox was no longer a theoretical impossibility—it was something she had to actively avoid.
"Ahh, so you already graduated from university, then?"
She laughed softly at the question.
"Of course I finished grad school too! I may not look it, but I graduated early from KAIST."
"You were something else. What mission were you originally supposed to carry out in space? Every researcher has a specialty."
"I was going to map the helium-3 deposits inside the lunar craters. Narrowing the search area from the size of a vast sea down to the size of a single athletic field—that was my job. In the future it becomes a highly sought-after energy resource, so every country is racing to explore the Moon."
Talking about herself like this, Hong Yu-jeong suddenly found herself curious about him.
"So why do you live out here all alone?"
"Yeah. Not that this is a contest over who's more miserable, but I don't have parents either. I was abandoned at a temple when I was little and raised by the monks. This house is what the abbot gave me."
Something about that made her glance around the room; a thought struck her, and she stepped out onto the veranda.
"Su-hyeon. Come outside."
"What? Call's over?"
"No. I've been so buried in worries I haven't thought about anything else, but how are you covering living expenses? Right now I'm just a freeloader wasting your food."
He scratched his head.
"Eh, I'm still fine for now. I've got money left from the part-time jobs I kept after graduating high school…"
"Don't be like that—at least give me some work gluing eyes onto dolls. Anything's better than sitting around the house doing nothing."
"…Doll eyes?"
He tilted his head, then said,
"Instead of that, since you came from the future, wouldn't investing be smarter?"
"Huh?"
Hong Yu-jeong's face went completely blank.
The audience watching her expression let out soft laughs.
Yes! You went to the past—you're supposed to make a killing on stocks! But wait… this is a romance, right…?
Jeong Yu-jin—reporter at Hansaeilbo and a member of Woo's—had already watched every single one of Ryu Yeon-woo's six projects, from dramas to stage plays. She tilted her head.
It had been the same in Berlin.
The first time she saw Sketch, she couldn't get a handle on the genre through the early stretch.
Only once she had watched it all the way through did the whole thing come into focus.
And that structure had left her head ringing, lingering with the audience long after.
Even when the director changes, most of Ryu Yeon-woo's projects are like this. Is that the power of the actor?
"What happened in 2006? Aaaagh! The only thing I can think of is the World Cup! And it's not like I remember the exact scores either…. Do I have to bet on wins and losses or something?"
Watching Hong Yu-jeong sink into a tangle of thoughts, Cha Su-hyeon tilted his head.
"It's not like you have to become a chaebol overnight. I just figured it might beat gluing doll eyes. I don't really need money anyway. I grew up with the monks from the time I was little, remember. Non-possession and contentment in poverty."
"Contentment in poverty isn't Buddhism—it comes from Yan Hui, Confucius's disciple. And me? I'm full-possession."
Cha Su-hyeon watched the fire rekindle in her and smiled faintly.
At least she seemed to be climbing out of the depression and finding some kind of goal. That was a relief.
"Listen! Next year the subprime mortgage crisis hits! And pretty soon smartphones are going to take over the world. Ah! Su-hyeon, have you ever heard the word Bitcoin? No—of course you haven't. It doesn't even exist yet."
"Bit-what…?"
The direction of all that passion seemed to be swinging toward him, and he was starting to feel a little cornered.