The burden of expectation can sometimes be a heavy weight to bear and after a little too much of it, many films simply crumble. In 2009, an indie Korean film clocking in at three and a half hours began to make the rounds of the festival circuit and attracted some very positive attention. After a full year screening at various events it was finally accorded a domestic release in late December 2010 but, like the vast majority of independent features, it failed to find an audience in Korea. A number of people (myself included) patiently awaited its DVD release but it never came… until now. After premiering at the Busan Film Festival in October 2009, Café Noir was finally released on DVD in June 2012.
While I can’t say exactly why the wait for the disc was so long, I can, to some extent, understand it. Here is a film with an enormous running time, some heavy source texts (Goethe and Dostoyevsky), painfully long takes and a fairly significant dollop of pretension; it is also the debut film of a long-standing film critic. Just one of these elements is dangerous enough to ward off all but the most adventurous film viewers but taken together it’s true that this film could only ever appeal to a very select crowd.
