Green Fish (1997)

Korean film directed by Lee Chang-Dong. The story follows a soldier who returns home after serving in the military. Things seem good as he meets a woman on a train at the beginning of the movie but, in defending her, ends up getting beat up on a train and losing his bags. This marks the beginning of a strange relationship and changes the soldiers life dramatically.

Upon returning home, the soldier doesn't really appear to know what to do with himself. His family and friends seem unchanged, but the world around him has changed tremendously. In pursuing the woman he had met on the train, he lucks into a job as a kind of mob henchman and gets caught up in a life and world which quickly exceeds his grasp.

Nice hard-luck movie with, otherwise, nothing too special to offer in terms of exceptional film-making. Ultimately, all of the characters are negatively affected by their apparently random relations or destinies. I enjoyed the tender love story, but generally don't like such tragic endings in which no one seems to survive or rise above daunting circumstances.