The Bacchus Lady, and What Could Only Be Asked of Her

It is autumn in a park in Jongno, the old centre of Seoul, and the benches are full of men with nowhere they need to be by any particular hour. A woman of sixty-five in jeans and a denim jacket sits down beside one of them, remarks that neither of them has many autumns left, and takes a small bottle out of her bag. It is Bacchus, an energy tonic sold in pharmacies and corner shops all over Korea, the sort of thing you might leave on a tired colleague’s desk at the end of the afternoon. On these benches it is a question. The men know what it is asking. Some take it. Some look at her as if she had insulted them.

Her name is So-young, or that is the name she goes by, and she is good at this work. Among the old men of the park she has a reputation, and the film’s Korean title turns the reputation into a pun that does not survive translation. In slang, the words mean the woman who is killer at it. Taken literally, they mean the woman who kills for you.

Then the men begin to come back, and not for that. A courteous widower she has not seen for years sits down next to her on a bus with news of men they both knew. One of her best regulars, a man who never wore anything but tailored suits, now lies in a hospital bed unable to do the smallest thing for himself, and says that this is not living. Another is losing his memory and has no one. One after another, three of her old clients ask her to help them die, or to stay with them while they do, and she does.

This essay is about the asking. It is not about whether assisted dying is right or wrong, a question the film does not settle and this essay will not try to. It is about what it means to be the person such a thing is asked of, and about why, for these men, it could only have been her. The film’s answer is plain and unsparing. They ask her because of what her work had been: for years she had been present to them at their most exposed, without flinching, and without a family’s stake in who they were supposed to be. And they ask her because there is nobody else.

A request like that is two things at once. It is the most serious trust anyone has ever placed in her. It is also a weight that belongs to a whole society, set down in the lap of one poor old woman because she happened to be sitting on the right bench. The film holds both, and then, at the very end, it turns the question round. When her own turn comes, who will do for her what she did for them?

This essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends: So-young’s arrest, and what follows. If you would rather see the film first, do; everything here will keep. The three deaths at its centre are stated plainly below, and none of them is described.

The Bacchus Lady was written and directed by E J-yong, a director known in Korea for polished, urbane commercial films, among them Untold Scandal (2003), his eighteenth-century Joseon version of Les Liaisons dangereuses. This one is small by comparison. It was produced by the Korean Academy of Film Arts, premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2016, and opened in South Korean cinemas on 6 October that year, rated for adults only. It runs 110 minutes. Youn Yuh-jung plays So-young, Jeon Moo-song plays Jae-woo, Yoon Kye-sang plays Do-hoon and An A-zu plays Tina. Five years later Youn became the first Korean actor to win an Academy Award, for Minari.

E has said the film began with something his mother said. They were travelling together, and she was about to buy eyebrow pencils when she stopped: there were three in the pack, and she would never get through them all. The remark lodged in him. The Bacchus Lady is, among other things, a film about people who have started counting like that.

The story, in outline. So-young makes her living in a park in Jongno, opening, like the other women who work there, with a bottle of Bacchus. At a clinic where she is being treated for gonorrhoea, a Filipino woman attacks the doctor, the married Korean man who left her and their small son, and is taken away by the police. In the confusion So-young takes the boy, Min-ho, home with her and keeps him out of the authorities’ hands. Home is a rented room in a run-down house in Itaewon. Her landlady, Tina, is a trans woman who sings in a lounge bar; her neighbour, Do-hoon, is a young man with a prosthetic leg and no steady work. Between the three of them they look after the child.

Then her old clients begin to ask her for something else. The three men, and what each of them asks, have a section of their own below, and so does what happens to So-young afterwards, which is the last movement of the film.

The film’s first decision, and its best, is about tone. So-young’s work is shown as what it is to her: a living. The story begins in a clinic, with a diagnosis. She has gonorrhoea, she is treated for it, and the film moves on, because she has to. When a rival in the park spreads word of the infection, she loses her usual spot and has to look for men in other parks. These are the conditions of a trade, and the film gives them the weight they would have in her week: a problem to be got round, not a lesson.

Writing about the film in 2022, the Korean critic Seo Gok-suk noticed how the camera handles the work itself. In the scenes with clients it tends to keep the man’s face towards us and So-young’s back: his excitement in front, her labour behind. It is not a flattering angle for the men and not a pitying one for her. It is the angle of someone watching a person do a hard job.

Nor does the film pretend that every man on those benches is gentle. There is a client who behaves as though what he paid for was whatever he wanted, and the film lets us see what that costs her without dwelling on it. Payment buys an hour and what was agreed inside it. It never buys the rest, and nothing in the film suggests that So-young thinks otherwise.

What the film refuses just as firmly is pity. So-young is sharp-tongued and funny. When a young man with a camera wants her for a documentary about women like her, she tells him not to call her granny. She feeds a stray cat. When money comes her way, she spends it on the people she lives with. The critic Jeong Min-a, reviewing the film the week it opened, described her as poor, old, a woman and alone, placed exactly where the absence of a working system has to be absorbed by one body, and added that she carries herself with dignity all the same.

There is a moment, noted by Variety’s reviewer at Berlin, when So-young stops to watch an old woman labouring along the street with a cart piled high with waste paper, and her face seems to be working out which of the two of them has fallen further. It is the only comparison the film lets her make, and it flatters nobody.

And at one point, when a television bulletin reports a man who killed an old person for money and the people around her click their tongues, So-young says, half to herself, that he must have his reasons too; that people only talk about the outside; that nobody knows what is inside. E J-yong has said it is a thing he often says himself. It is worth holding on to. The film comes back to it, at her expense.

So this essay’s first commitment is the film’s own: to take her work as a living, done with skill under conditions she did not set, and to take her as one woman rather than as a figure for all older women. She is not every old woman in Korea, or anywhere else. She is a particular woman with a particular history, which the film parcels out in fragments, and she is funny, and proud, and tired.

Min-ho comes into her life by accident, in a clinic corridor, and she takes him the way the director says she takes in strays: without a plan, because nobody else there is going to. From then on he is a small boy who needs feeding, minding and putting to bed, and the film treats him as exactly that.

The minding is shared. Tina takes her turn with the boy. Variety’s reviewer called An A-zu’s performance elegant and dignified, and the film gives Tina the same courtesy. She is not a colourful detail at the edge of someone else’s story. She owns the house, she knows enough of So-young’s past to ask about it, and she takes her share of the child. Do-hoon, the young man next door with the prosthetic leg, takes his share too. When So-young takes the boy to a support centre and an official tells them that what they have done amounts to abduction, it is Do-hoon who answers, simply, that they are not bad people.

So-young, for her part, takes Min-ho to see his mother in detention. She is not keeping him. She is keeping him safe until he can go back.

Choi Sung-wook, a Korean-born film scholar who took his doctorate in Japan, wrote about the film in 2022 for the Japanese women’s site Cyzo Woman, in a series on learning Korea’s modern history through its films, and he pointed out what this household does to the film’s argument. It puts at the centre people with no place in the system, a trans woman, a disabled young man, a child of two countries, and shows the weak helping the weak; and by doing so it makes visible exactly where welfare and rights are missing. Jeong Min-a noticed something gentler: nobody in this house asks anybody about the past. They take each other as they are.

Underneath the household runs a rhyme the film never spells out. Min-ho’s father is a married Korean doctor who left a Filipino woman and their son. Decades earlier, So-young had a son with an American soldier who left, and she gave the boy up for adoption. Variety’s reviewer saw the connection: the film sets the country’s long-hushed history of adoptions, and of children fathered by American soldiers, beside the newer story of children fathered by Korean men in the Philippines. The film makes no speech of it. It lets us watch a woman who could not keep one child keeping another for a while, until his mother can have him back.

Jae-woo is the messenger and, in the end, the last to ask. He is courteous and gentlemanly. He runs into her on a bus after years, and he fills her in on the regulars she has lost touch with. Behind his manners he is carrying a grief he has had for a long time: his son died young, and his wife died five years ago, to the day.

The first man he tells her about was known once as Sebiro Song, sebiro being an old word for a Western suit, because he wore nothing else: a man with a good pension who always treated her well. A stroke has left him in a hospital bed, unable to do anything for himself without a carer, and his son’s family visits the way people visit an obligation. He tells her this is not living, and he asks her to help him die. She helps him.

The second is Jong-soo, Jae-woo’s friend, who lives alone in a single tiny room and is losing a little more of his memory each day. He has no family. It is Jae-woo who brings his request to her, and Jong-soo who confirms it. She helps him too.

Then Jae-woo asks for himself, and what he wants is not quite what the others wanted. He does not want to die alone. He takes her to dinner, and to a hotel room high above Seoul, and there he takes his own life with So-young beside him. In the morning she weeps over him. He has left her money.

She gives most of the money to Jogyesa, the big Buddhist temple in the middle of Seoul, and spends a little on one good day: she takes Tina, Do-hoon and Min-ho out for a meal near Imjingak, close to the northern border. It is there that Tina asks So-young whether she was one of those who came south across the 38th parallel, using the old contemptuous word for them, and So-young says she has not heard that word in a long time.

How each of these deaths happens is not described here. What this essay cares about, and what the film keeps its eyes on, is who is in the room.

Consider who else these men might have asked. Song has a son, whose family comes and goes. Jong-soo has nobody. Jae-woo has buried a son and a wife. And the thing they want to ask about is, as E J-yong put it to Variety in Berlin, “something we don’t like to talk about very much”. A man in their position cannot say it to his children without turning it into a quarrel, or into a verdict on them. He cannot say it to a doctor without asking the doctor to risk exactly what So-young is arrested for in the end.

So the request goes to the one person in their lives who already stands outside respectability, and who knows them in a way no one else does: at their weakest and most ridiculous, when a man can least pretend to be anything, and who never once looked away. What she sold them, all those years, was presence at the point where a man is most exposed. At the end they ask her for the same thing at another point.

This Library argued something close to this in “A Carefully Bounded Stranger May Hear What Familiar Life Has Stopped Asking”: that familiar people carry archives, and that someone met inside agreed limits can hear what a family cannot, because what is said to her does not become a referendum on a whole life. So-young is not a stranger to these men. But she stands outside the archive. She has no stake in what kind of father, husband or provider they were. The one thing she knows about them is the thing their families were never shown.

And it is here that the film meets the question this Library put in “Does Paying for Companionship Make Intimacy Fake?”. That essay separated two things the word real is usually asked to carry at once: continuity, whether something lasts and gives you a place in another person’s life, and presence, whether the other person was actually there. It argued that paid time can hold the second without the first, and that not lasting and not happening are different claims. The Bacchus Lady puts that argument to the hardest test it could be given. When these men reach the end, they do not turn to the people who had continuity with them. They turn to the one who was present. Whatever else passed between them on those benches and in those rooms, it was real enough to be trusted with this.

But the film does not stop at vindication, and it would be dishonest to stop there on its behalf. It goes on to ask what the arrangement left her with, and that is the other half of the distinction, turned against her. She gave them presence. Nobody owed her continuity. When the men were gone, nothing they had been to one another gave her any claim on anyone.

Before any reading of her, her reasons. Why does she say yes? The film offers more than one and does not rank them. Pity, first: Song was always good to her, and now he cannot do the smallest thing for himself. Something like solidarity: she is as old and as poor as these men, and dying alone is not an abstraction to a woman who lives in a rented room. Guilt, perhaps: in the director’s account of her, she carries all her life the guilt of not having protected her son. And something she might not name herself: for once, being asked not for her body but for her judgement.

That last may matter more than it seems. Her life, as the film lets us piece it together, has been a list of names other people gave her. The men’s request is the first thing anyone in the film asks of her that assumes she is a person who can be trusted with a life. It is a terrible form of recognition. It is recognition all the same, and it would be condescending to pretend she feels nothing of it.

The film does not let that stand alone. Describing her to the newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun when the film opened, E J-yong called So-young a strong woman who cleans up after irresponsible men who ask her for death. Jeon Moo-song, who plays Jae-woo, is reported to have said on reading the script that this woman was an angel. The two descriptions pull in opposite directions, and the film is more interesting than either. She is not an angel. She is not only an instrument either. She is a woman making hard decisions under pressures the men do not share: a man’s money, a man’s gratitude, her own poverty, and the loneliness of all of them at once.

Seo Gok-suk put the difficulty precisely. Why, Seo asked, should the suffering of the old be borne by one person, and why is a social responsibility being handed to an individual? In Seo’s reading the deaths are continuous with the work. In both, So-young answers other people’s demands completely, and that is what ruins her. The men thank her. Jae-woo tells her he will never forget the good she has done him. His gratitude, and his money, are part of what puts her in a cell.

Her yes to these men is hers, and the film treats it as a decision rather than as something that merely happens to her. But a yes given under that much weight is not the same as a yes given freely, and the men, who have nothing left to lose, carry none of the risk of it. She carries all of it.

This is the ending.

Security cameras record her leaving the hotel, and the police come for her. She does not defend herself. In the police car she smokes, and asks, with a dry sort of calm, whether she might be sent to prison in the spring instead, because she feels the cold. She will not run, she says. She could never have afforded a care home anyway, and prison at least means three meals a day.

Min-ho’s mother is due for release, and he will go home with her to the Philippines. The household that gathered round him never had any standing anywhere, and when he goes, it has nothing left to be.

So-young dies in prison, alone. The box of her belongings records no family and no friends.

Remember what she said about the man on the news: that people only talk about the outside, that nobody knows the inside. The outside of her last night is a camera image, a dead man, a hotel room and money. That is the story the police can read, and she does not try to give them another. Perhaps she thought it would not help. Perhaps the truth would have meant telling them about the men, and the men were hers to keep quiet about. Perhaps prison really was, as she said, warmer than the alternatives. The film does not choose among these, and neither should a reader.

The film asks the question it has been building towards: who will do for her what she did for others? Nobody in the film does. Its point is not that nobody could have. It is that nothing in her world was arranged so that anybody would.

E J-yong was blunt about the country around her when he spoke to Variety in Berlin. Fifty years earlier, he said, Korea had been one of the poorest countries in the world; it had become one of the largest economies, and it had changed so fast that there was no looking back. “The traditional system of filial duty, where children support their parents, is almost completely gone now,” he said, and “many elderly are desperately poor”.

On poverty, measured the way the OECD measures it, the figures bear him out. In 2022, according to the OECD’s Pensions at a Glance 2025, 39.7 percent of South Koreans aged sixty-six and over were living on less than half the national median income, measured as household disposable income adjusted for household size; in 2011 the share had been about eight points higher. The same report finds older women poorer than older men, and the gap between their poverty rates wider than it was in 2011. The film states a version of this fact itself. It is set down here for one reason only, and it is not to compare Korea with anywhere else. It is to say that So-young is not a freak of the plot.

Her own past arrives in fragments. The director filled in the rest when the film opened. He set her birth in June 1950, days before the Korean War began; she was orphaned by it; she worked as a live-in maid; and then, in a camptown by an American base, she lived with an American soldier and had a son, whom she gave up for adoption when they parted. In the film the camptown has a name, Dongducheon, north of Seoul, and an old colleague from those days turns up, settled now, with a family.

Choi Sung-wook noticed that her whole history reaches us through four words: the old slur for refugees who came south across the 38th parallel, the word for a girl sent to live in someone else’s house as a maid, a factory, and Dongducheon. Each of them is a name the world gave her. Her given name, the film lets slip, is Mi-suk; So-young is the name she works under. Choi’s way of putting it is that Mi-suk was never once Mi-suk.

None of this was private misfortune alone. “The Korean government allowed and controlled prostitution for the U.S. soldiers. It was like public prostitution,” E told Variety in 2016. Six years later, in September 2022, South Korea’s Supreme Court upheld a ruling that the state had acted unlawfully in creating, managing and running the camptowns around American bases and in justifying and encouraging the trade in them, and confirmed compensation for 95 women who had worked there. Reporting the ruling, the Seoul Shinmun noted that officials had once given the women English lessons, called them patriots, and even promised them security in their old age.

Security in their old age. The woman in this film grows old on a park bench and dies in a prison. She is a fictional character, and nothing in this essay makes her a stand-in for the real women who went to court. But her life has a date of birth, and in a film like this, dates are not accidents.

The film came to Japan quietly: a Korean film week in the summer of 2017, then a release on disc, under a Japanese title that keeps only the name of the drink and loses the pun. Its most careful reader in Japanese may be Choi Sung-wook. Writing for Japanese women, he explained Bacchus as the kind of small tonic bottle anyone in Japan would recognise, and when he came to her death he reached for a Japanese word, muenbotoke: the dead whom nobody comes to claim.

Japanese viewers who found the film wrote about it in two ways that are worth keeping apart. Some treated it as a window onto a dark side of Korea. Others wrote that it was not only Korea’s problem, and that in Japan, too, there are people coming to the end of their lives in prison. The first reaction deserves a gentle refusal: a film about one woman is not evidence about a national character, and the figure above is not a league table. The second is closer, but it is still a comparison, and the film’s question does not need one. It travels on its own.

What travels is not the park. It is the box. For a woman in Japan in her forties or fifties, the question of who will be there at the end may already arrive in one of two ways. It comes as a telephone call, when a hospital rings and she is the one in the family who is asked. Or it comes on paper, as the line on an admission form or a rental application that asks for an emergency contact, and the small pause before she writes a name. So-young’s box is that form, filled in by nobody.

For a woman living in Japan with her family in another country, the pause is longer. The form asks for someone nearby, and nearby is precisely what she does not have. This Library has argued, in “Having People Around Is Not the Same as Having Someone to Call”, that a large network can have a hole exactly where it is needed. The Bacchus Lady is about a woman whose network had that hole at its centre, and who spent her last years filling the same hole for other people.

There is one more film this Library has read that belongs beside this one. In Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), a retired teacher, widowed, books a hotel room and a young sex worker, and brings a list of things she has never done. Set the two films side by side. There, the older woman is the one who pays, in a clean room, and the film is about her permission to want. Here, the older woman is the one who is paid, on a park bench, and nobody in the film asks what she wants at all. Both films take the work seriously as work. What separates them is money, and who, in old age, gets to be the one whose wanting counts.

Now the objections, as strongly as they can be made. Four of them deserve room here, and the first two could undo this reading altogether.

The first comes from Choi Sung-wook, and it cuts against the word this essay has leaned on hardest, which is trust. Having traced the life behind the four words, Choi wondered whether something else lay under her kindness: whether, to a woman sacrificed at every turn of her country’s history, the men’s wish to die, because a body had stopped obeying, because a memory was going, because a wife had died, might look like an indulgence; and whether her yes might hold, somewhere, her own quiet revenge on the men and on the male-centred society that had used her all her life. He offered it as a suspicion rather than a finding, and it is a serious one. The film gives her tears, and tears do not settle it; a person can weep over what some part of her also meant. What can be said is that the film does not choose, and a reading that chooses for it, angel or avenger, has made her simpler than she is.

The second turns Seo Gok-suk’s point on the film itself. If the tragedy is that a society’s burden is handed to one poor old woman, the film may do the very thing it depicts: it loads onto one fictional woman a pension system, a camptown history, a migrant child, two neighbours the system has no place for, and three deaths, and asks her to carry them all. Critics said as much in their own terms. The Asian Cinema Critic found too many stories in it for any to have room. Another reviewer, writing online, felt it raises the question of assisted dying without exploring it in any depth. The Korean magazine Arts & Culture wished it had shown more precisely what the men were thinking when they asked her to go with them to their deaths, and what was happening inside her. And according to the Kyunghyang interview, E did not meet any of the women who work in the parks, or research their lives directly, before writing; he worked from news reports, a few current-affairs documentaries and imagination. The film’s knowledge of her is secondhand. This essay’s is further removed still.

The film even contains a figure for that problem. A young man with a camera follows her, wanting her story for a film about women like her. She tells him not to call her granny, and gives him, reluctantly, a few facts about the maid’s work and the factory. This essay is one more outsider with a question about her life, and the least it can do is notice that she did not ask to be written about.

The third is the oldest trap in films about women who sell sex: the discovery that she has the purest heart of anyone. The film’s plainness resists it, and Variety’s reviewer found its ending neither artificially upbeat nor exploitatively tragic. But any reading that makes So-young the moral centre of the film, this one included, risks turning her into a saint because she was paid, which is only contempt facing the other way.

The last objection is aimed at this Library. This house sells private companionship, so a film in which paid company turns out to be the last company three men have is not neutral ground for it, and the reading offered here, in which what she gave them was real, is exactly the reading a house like this would like to find. Weigh it accordingly. Two things are said here, and only two. Nothing in the film argues for any business, this one included: what these men needed at the end was money enough, a place to be cared for, and someone to whom the word death could be said without its turning into a quarrel or a danger, and none of that is sold anywhere. And the film’s last question, who will do for her what she did for them, is not one that anything for sale can answer.

Not that paid company is the answer to loneliness in old age. The film says the opposite as clearly as a film can. What these men needed at the end was not one more hour with So-young. It was everything that would have kept that hour from being their last resort.

What it takes is narrower, and harder. Presence can be real inside a paid arrangement; the trust of these men is the proof, and it would be a small cruelty to So-young to deny it. But presence without continuity leaves the one who gives it owed nothing, by anyone, when her own turn comes. She was present at three deaths. Nobody was present at hers.

There are good reasons a person becomes the one who is asked. Being needed is a kind of belonging, sometimes the only kind on offer. Saying no costs something, often more than saying yes. And being the reliable one can be the last form of standing left to someone who has been given very little of it. None of these are foolish. They are how people keep a place in the world.

So, once, to you. If you are the one who gets asked, the daughter the hospital rings first, the friend who takes the call after midnight, the woman at work to whom everyone brings the thing they cannot bring to anyone else, then being asked is a form of trust, and you are right to feel it as one. It is also a handing over of weight, and you are allowed to notice that too. Neither makes you selfish. And it is not a complaint to ask, quietly and in good time, the question the film asks too late: who would come for me?

This is a reading of a film. It takes no position for or against assisted dying, and nothing in it is advice about death or about anyone’s care. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real. The figures are the ones their named sources report, and they are not a ranking of countries. If reading about these deaths has brought the thought of your own closer than you would like, that is something to say to a person trained to hear it, not to an essay about a film. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare lists telephone consultation lines, among them Inochi no Denwa and the Yorisoi Hotline, which is free, answers around the clock and can connect callers in languages other than Japanese. Making that call is not an overreaction. It is a telephone call.

Is there something you could ask only of someone outside your family? Who would that be, and what would it mean to them to be asked?

Are you the one who gets asked? What does it give you, what does it cost you, and does anyone else know about the second part?

If a form asked you tonight for someone to call, whose name would you write, and would they know they were on it?

Has anyone been fully present to you without any claim on your future? What, if anything, do you owe them, and what do they owe you?