Winter Song starts with an absurd scene of an aristocrat with a pipe in his mouth, getting his head cut off during Reign of Terror right after French Revolution. Then the camera jumps to the year 2000 and war between Georgia and Russia. An eccentric priest with a tattoo on his chest obsessively baptizes the soldiers who kill, rob and rape civilians. The camera takes another jump to modern day Paris, to various people living in a building, and its caretaker. The caretaker is quite a cultured man. While selling bazooka to buy antique books, he silently observe the building’s diverse residents: a miserable man who is about to lose his family’s inheritance to the government, a tramp who piles up pebbles to make a shelter, roller-skating pickpockets, an homeless man crushed to death by a steamroller. The veteran director’s touch in painting fragmented lives of characters coming and going inside the frame rather than dramatizing them seems to be reinforced in Winter Song. The film shows the characteristics of the director’s previous works. (RHEE Soue-won)