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Visual, honest, formed filmmaking makes for great movie viewing in Never Forever.

The Film – Never Forever, writer-director Gina Kim’s second effort (her 2003 debut, Invisible Light, is next to myth in its availability), is throbbingly gorgeous, both aesthetically and internally. But make no mistake about it: this drama belongs to Vera Farmiga, whose soulful performance as a woman distraught by the fragility of life and happiness endorses something that feels remarkably close to blunt philosophy, if not the real article. The simplicity of Kim’s directness is so appealing, so fresh. As is her writing and layering. It’s not so much that she’s the first to weave ’60s melodrama well enough in contemporary cinema, rather that what she’s woven is a quilt twice as pretty and twice as soft as the better majority of others’. She laces a tender, sympathetic story with great human insight and equally human carnality. Not only will it sponsor chest pains, Never Forever will arouse the very eroticism that Bertolucci inspired over thirty years ago in movies. And it’s all so graceful.

Sophie (Farmiga) is a white woman married to a successful Asian American named Andrew (David Lee McInnis). The two are deeply in love, yet are unable to conceive a child—and the effects of such a burden are beginning to outweigh their otherwise incontrovertible affection for one another. Anxious about the loosening state of their marriage, and frantic to find a solution, Sophie ends up in the bed of a Korean man, Jihah (Jung-woo Ha), whom she followed home from a fertility clinic and proposed a “business” plan to, whereupon Jihah would be financially compensated for what she believes would ultimately fix her relationship with Andrew. Neither initially driven by infidelity—Jihah is an illegal immigrant working to raise money to bring his girlfriend to the States—rather desperation, their emotions unravel as does the situation, summoning painful consequences.

Never Forever paints a haunting portrait of despair and despondency, each elevated by the picture’s crushing score, which is fabricated by composer Michael Nyman (The Libertine) and a spanning spectrum of violin pitches. And it is strikingly lived-in; it’s bitterly real. Like life itself, it’s honest and vague. Still, it’s an amiable work, and Kim bears proof in its almost surreal closing frames, whose façade of uncertainty (there’s a definitive answer, and it’s as clear as a day at the beach, but only if you were paying close attention to prior scenes) is a gracious act, and an exquisite one. All of the elegance, torment, passion, and hesitation of the whole is packed into a moment’s point, and channeled heartbreakingly through Sophie’s eyes. In a movie of immaculate beauty and pensive diagnostics, it’s what I’ll remember most. 4 ½ stars

The Extras – Whereas Never Forever prospers from its artistry, its bonus components on the DVD abate (if but merely a tad) the sweeping feeling of the feature, offering little more than zilch to the sum of the video product. With three extras, excluding a theatrical trailer and including a brief still photo gallery and two featurettes, whose combined runtime slightly exceeds 8 minutes, it becomes clear to one that the passion for the motion picture wasn’t hardly one to share with additional filming (or still photographing). Each supplement comes with its own dissatisfaction: obviously, the gallery is dissatisfactory, functioning more as a slap-to-the-face of the buyers than anything else; a short titled Never Forever in New York, which runs 5-and-a-half minutes in length, is, in fact, a gag reel overscored by an annoying tune one might hear at a stepdancing convention; and, lastly, a 2-min. coupling of interviews with Vera Farmiga and her costar Jung-woo Ha is hampered by both its brevity and the absence of an English subtitle option—Ha speaks Korean in his interview, which is subbed with…Korean (uh, filmmakers, we don’t all speak, understand, or read Korean). 1 star

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