Love and Leashes, and the Listening a Contract Cannot Do

A parcel lands on the wrong desk. Two colleagues at a public relations firm have names so alike, Jung Ji-woo and Jung Ji-hoo, that a delivery meant for him ends up with her, and she opens it: a leather collar and a leash. He arrives in a panic and says they are for his dog. Then a coupon from a sex shop falls out of the box.

It is a comic opening, and Love and Leashes plays it for comedy. It is also an accident of delivery. A man’s most private wish has reached one colleague by mistake, and she keeps it to herself. What becomes of a secret, the film seems to understand, depends almost entirely on who receives it.

Out of that accident the film builds something a romantic comedy rarely troubles to build. Ji-hoo has been ashamed of what he wants for years. Ji-woo is a capable manager whom the men around her talk over. He asks her to be the one in charge; she refuses, then agrees on her own terms, spends a night reading, and the two of them sign a contract: three months, a set of rules and a word that stops everything. Kink here is not a dark secret dragged into the light. It is something two adults negotiate, in writing, with an end date.

That is the film’s best idea, and this essay takes it seriously. It is also an idea with a limit, and the film puts the limit on screen, whether it means to or not. A contract can record what two people agree. It can name the word that stops things. What it cannot do is hear the word when it is said. Only a person can do that, each time, in the moment, and nothing written in advance can do it for them.

It is a film, too, about a woman whose word counts for little at work, and who is given, in private, a place where it counts for everything. Whether that place can protect her anywhere else is the question the film finally puts. Its answer deserves more thought than a romantic comedy usually gets, and this essay will come to it only after saying plainly where the ending begins.

Love and Leashes is a South Korean Netflix film, released there on 11 February 2022. Park Hyun-jin directed it and wrote the screenplay with Lee Da-hye, from Gyeoul’s webtoon Moral Sense, which is also the film’s Korean title. Seohyun plays Jung Ji-woo and Lee Jun-young plays Jung Ji-hoo; both came to acting from K-pop groups, she from Girls’ Generation and he from U-KISS. Lee El plays Ji-woo’s closest friend, Hye-mi, and Ahn Seung-gyun plays Lee Han, a junior colleague devoted to Ji-woo. In Japan the film goes by the Korean title in katakana, with a line added that means, roughly, you are my master. That line comes back later.

Reviewers were fond of it and unconvinced by it at the same time. One found it more an explainer of relationships of dominance and submission than a portrait of the two people in this one, and the romance itself rather chaste. Another thought it beautiful and ambitious and untidy. Several credited it with something rarer than polish: a film about kink in which the kink is agreed to rather than sprung on anyone.

Two notes before going further. The film was not screened for this essay. Its scenes are described as published synopses and reviews describe them, and what its characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. And the essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends, because the ending is where the film makes its argument about the word for stop. It will say so again where the ending begins.

One more. Nothing here describes what happens in the sessions themselves, and nothing here is advice about how anyone should arrange their own. The essay is about what the film does with an agreement, not about how to make one.

Begin with Ji-woo at work, because the film does. She is a manager at the firm, sharp and good at her job, and the men around her undermine her and talk over her as a matter of routine. One reviewer noted that almost the first thing the film shows her doing is arguing against sponsoring an online star over homophobic remarks. Another described a sexist boss whom she keeps challenging, though a colleague advises her to ignore him. She has the qualities an office says it wants, in an office that does not want to hear them from her.

Then comes the small scene on which the whole plot turns, and it is worth slowing down for. After the business with the parcel, Ji-hoo thanks her for not telling anyone what she saw, and Ji-woo apologises to him. She has been aggressive, she says; she has a way of bossing people around. Ji-hoo hears the apology as a confession. He thinks she is telling him that she is a dominant, and he begs her to be his mistress, in the sense the film means: the one in charge.

It is a joke about a misunderstanding, and an exact one. A woman who is good at being in charge has learned to apologise for it. The man who hears the apology hears the very thing she is sorry for as the thing he wants most. The office has taught her that her authority is a fault to be excused; the first person in the film who wants her authority wants it so badly that he mistakes her excuse for an offer.

She refuses. That matters, and the film lets it matter. He asks again, after telling her more, and she declines again. Her no is not treated as the opening of a negotiation, something to be worn down. It is her answer, and it stays her answer until she changes it herself.

Ji-hoo’s side of the story begins more quietly. To everyone at work he seems to have everything. He has been hiding for years. A girlfriend, Ha-na, left him over what he wanted, and he has been ashamed of it ever since. At a work event Ji-woo comes across him in tears, and he tells her. She tells him she does not think he is a pervert.

The scene is short and it carries a great deal. His wish has been found out in close to the worst way a secret can be found out: by accident, by a colleague, at work. And the colleague has done the one thing he could not have counted on. She kept it to herself, and when he told her the rest, she did not recoil.

What has weighed on Ji-hoo may be less the wish than the years of keeping it out of sight, and telling lifts some of that weight here because the person told can hold what she hears without turning it into a weapon. It is worth noticing what does the lifting. Nothing has been agreed yet. There is no contract, no session, no practice of any kind. What eases his shame is one person’s response to being told.

That will matter later, because stories about desire are often tempted to hand the credit to the arrangement, as if the practice itself had healed him. It did not, and this essay will not pretend that it did. An arrangement of power is not a cure for shame. Whatever relief Ji-hoo finds begins before anything is signed, with a sentence from someone who heard him and did not look away.

When she asks him why he wants her in particular, he names three things: her confidence, her maturity and her integrity. Every one of them is something her colleagues spend their days talking over.

She agrees on her own, walking home from work that evening, and spends the rest of the night reading about BDSM. The film follows her research, with a narration that explains what she is learning, down to the difference, as the critic Kate Sánchez describes it, between an arrangement of dominance and submission that is psychological and one that involves sex. It is a lovely detail and a characteristic one. Before she takes charge of anything, she does her homework.

Then they sign. The contract, as reviewers describe it, runs for three months, with Ji-woo as the dominant and Ji-hoo as the submissive. It has rules, and a safeword. He agrees not to touch her, which takes sex off the table. Sánchez notes that the film shows the two of them talking about safewords, and shows care taken afterwards when what they do grows more intense.

It is easy to underrate how unusual this is. Popular stories about this kind of desire have mostly told it as a secret dragged into the light, or as a seduction in which one person’s wishes overwhelm the other’s. Sánchez, praising the film, said as much: most depictions of kink involve some level of coercion and little discussion of boundaries. In this film the desire is on paper before it is anywhere else.

This Library’s essay “The Fantasies That Feel Hardest to Say Often Need the Clearest Language” argued that the more a wish would be harmed by being misread, the more it needs to be put into words before anything happens, with its limits stated in the same breath. The film takes that almost literally. The wish Ji-hoo could not say for years ends up in the clearest language an office knows: terms, a date and two signatures. The same essay said something else that the film will need later. The listener has a job too, and a listener who cannot do it is not yet a safe person to tell, “however much he is loved”.

There is a quieter point in the form. A contract is an office’s genre, all terms and dates and signatures. In Steven Shainberg’s Secretary an office’s other grammar, errors and their correction, let two shy people begin something neither could say, and it had no word in it for stop; the essay on that film, “Secretary, and a Yes Given Where She Could Say No”, argued that a yes is believable only where a no is possible. Love and Leashes borrows the office’s paperwork instead, and writes the no in first.

So hold on to that word. A safeword, as the film uses it, is a word agreed in advance that stops whatever is happening, whoever says it and whatever else is being said. It belongs to neither role. Its whole value lies in the fact that it is not weighed: the person who hears it does not pause to decide whether it ought to work. The rest of the film is, among other things, a test of that sentence.

The film sets one scene beside the contract on purpose. Hye-mi, Ji-woo’s closest friend, who runs a pub for dog owners and shares Ji-hoo’s wish to submit, calls Ji-woo for help when a man turns violent with her at a love hotel, and Ji-woo and Ji-hoo get her out and take her home.

The film puts the fault where it belongs, with a man who respects none of the things the couple have written down for themselves: terms, limits, a word for stop. Hye-mi’s wish is not what goes wrong that night; it is the same wish Ji-hoo has. What separates her night from the arrangement Ji-woo and Ji-hoo have made is not the desire. It is the terms, and whether the other person keeps them.

It is also the scene that should make a reader a little wary of the film’s confidence in paper. A contract does not make anyone safe. It records what two people who are already safe with each other have agreed. The man at the love hotel would not have been made safe by a document, and Ji-hoo is not safe because he signed one. He is safe, if he is, because he listens. The film will come back to that.

For a while the arrangement works, and spills beyond its terms. Ji-woo’s authority, let out in private, begins to show at work: she orders other people about, the junior Lee Han especially, and Ji-hoo is jealous. To reassure him she keeps him in the office after hours, where a security guard very nearly finds them. The sessions draw her in and confuse her. She asks him to be her boyfriend. He tells her he does not date.

Reviewers divided over what the film thinks it is doing with her authority. Sánchez saw in Ji-woo’s dominance an outlet for the frustration she feels when she cannot answer back to a sexist boss. Harrison Chute found the film at its clearest when it ties her awakening to her barely contained rage at her supervisor, and then asked the harder question, whether there is “an equation being drawn between female dominance in sexual roleplay and female empowerment in society”. He found the thought troubling, and he was right to.

It is a good question, and the film will answer it more bluntly than either reviewer could have expected. What can be said before the ending is that the private room is doing two jobs at once. It is the place where Ji-hoo can be who he is without shame. And it is the one place in the film where Ji-woo’s word counts for exactly what she means by it. Those are different jobs. The first depends on the room staying private. The second depends on her word being heard. The rest of the film tests both.

From here, this essay describes how the film ends.

On the contract’s last day, Ha-na comes to see Ji-hoo and tells him that his selfishness is why he cannot love. That night, in their final session, Ji-woo, who has spent three months with a man pledged not to touch her, tells him he may do whatever he wants. He kisses her. She pushes him away. He tells her that he loves her and that he has been afraid of being hurt, and she leaves.

Notice the shape of that, because the film will repeat it. A permission that sounded unlimited turned out to have an edge, and she drew the edge at once, with her hands. After her stop came his confession. This time, in private, at the end of the agreement, she walked out.

Then a second accident of delivery, and it goes very differently from the first. Lee Han’s recorder has caught one of their sessions in the office. Han, the junior colleague devoted to Ji-woo, sends the audio, by email, to the whole office. It is a mistake.

The film is a comedy, and the email is a blunder. None of that changes what the email is. The most private hour two people had, which they had agreed to share with each other and with no one else, is played to everyone they work with. It is a serious violation of their privacy, and the harm of it does not depend on what the sender meant. This essay will not treat it as a comic turn, because for the two people in it, it was not one.

Be exact about what was and was not agreed to. Ji-woo and Ji-hoo took a risk by holding sessions in the office after hours; the film has already shown a guard almost walking in on them. But the risk of being seen by a passing guard and the fact of being heard by everyone they work with are not the same thing, and a risk taken is not a permission given. What they agreed to was each other. Nobody agreed to an audience.

It is also the exact opposite of the telling that eased Ji-hoo’s shame at the start. That was chosen: his moment, his words, one listener who could hold what he said. This is chosen by no one. Not the moment, not the words, not the listeners. He had been relieved because one person heard his secret and kept it. Now everyone has heard it, and nobody is keeping anything.

The recording brings the two of them before management, a disciplinary committee in one account. The meeting turns into harassment, and the sexism in it is aimed at Ji-woo.

Name it for what it is, because the film moves quickly and it would be easy to pass over. A meeting about conduct at work has become something else. People with power over two employees’ jobs, having heard a recording those employees never meant anyone to hear, go on to harass them, and the sharpest edge of it lands on the woman. It happens in the room where the office’s power is most concentrated, to the two people whose privacy the office has just broken.

Ji-woo does what she has done all film long. She defends herself. And Ji-hoo steps in and takes all the blame: the whole thing, he says in effect, was his doing.

On its face it is gallant. He puts his own job and his own name in front of hers, and many viewers will cheer. But look at the room. A woman whom the men of this office have talked over since the first scene was speaking in her own defence, and a man has stepped in and started speaking for her.

So Ji-woo says the safeword. Ji-hoo goes on anyway, and declares, in front of the managers, that he wants to be with her. The story calls it love.

Recall what that word is. It is the one word in their arrangement that belongs to neither role, and saying it stops everything. It works because it is not weighed. The person who hears it does not pause to decide whether the speaker really means it, or whether stopping is in her best interest.

She uses it outside the arrangement, in a meeting, after the contract’s term has run out. That is not a technicality, and it comes back in the case against this reading. But why she might reach for it is not hard to imagine. Ordinary words have been failing her in rooms like this since the film began. This is the strongest word the two of them have, the one they agreed nobody would argue with. She is not asking him to consider her view. She is using the word that ends the discussion.

He goes on. He goes on to protect her, taking the blame so that she will not have to carry it, and to say aloud, in front of the people who have just humiliated them both, the thing he was too frightened to say for most of the film. The film offers it as the moment he stops hiding: the end of his secret, and the beginning of their life together in the open.

This essay does not want to brush that aside, and it passes no verdict on Ji-hoo, a character trying, at his own cost, to shield someone he loves. What it wants to weigh is what the film has done with the word. The film has shown its audience a couple who agree on one word that always works. At its climax it has the man who agreed to that word hear it and go on, for her sake, and the story calls it love. A safeword that love can outweigh is no longer a safeword. It is a request, and requests are weighed.

Notice, too, the shape of the scene. The film began with a woman whom her colleagues talk over. At its climax a man talks over her as well, at the same firm, in front of the same kind of men, out of love. The film may not intend the rhyme. It is there all the same, and it is the film’s own answer to the question about dominance and power. The authority Ji-woo holds in private did not carry into the meeting. Even the one man who had asked her for it, and signed for it, set it aside at the moment it mattered most, for her own good.

This is where the listener’s job comes due. Everything in the contract depended on it, and none of it could be put in the contract. The word could be written down. Hearing it could not.

Then the film gives Ji-woo her authority back, and the way it does so deserves as much attention as the safeword. She persuades Han to send the office the recordings he holds of several managers’ extramarital affairs. The managers are suspended. Ji-woo and Ji-hoo begin to date openly, and they keep their arrangement.

The film plays it as justice, and it is easy to see why. The managers have just harassed two people over a recording of their private life, and it turns out they have private lives of their own that would not survive the same treatment. There is a satisfaction in that, and the film is not wrong to know it.

But as this essay reads it, it is the same act: recordings of people’s private lives, sent to everyone they work with. The film has just shown what that act does to the people it exposes, and asked us to feel it as a violation. Soon afterwards it does the same thing to other people and asks us to enjoy it. And an affair is never one person’s private life alone. There is always someone else in it, and often a family who had no say in any of it. The film’s idea of privacy turns out to be conditional. It protects the people the story likes.

Read this way, power in this office belongs to whoever holds the recordings. The managers could put the couple on trial because one recording existed. Ji-woo can bring the managers down because more recordings existed. And all of them are in the hands of one junior colleague, the same one whose recorder started this. It is not a comfortable place for a romantic comedy to leave its office. One reviewer found that the obstacles driving the last act arrive suddenly and then seem to matter little, and this is where that judgement bites. The harm done by one recording is settled by others, and what any of the people on them were owed is not the question the ending is built to answer.

This Library’s essay “Because This Is My First Life, and the Contract That Had to End Before It Could Be True” found that a contract holds everything that passes between the two people who signed it and nothing that comes with them. Love and Leashes bears out the second half from outside: its contract could not keep out an office that was, quite literally, listening. But the climax asks something harder, which that essay had no need to ask. Even between the two people who signed, the contract held the word and not the hearing of it. Paper can say what stop is. Only the person who hears it can make it true.

The film’s Japanese title keeps the Korean one, Moral Sense, and adds a line: you are my master, with the honorific goshujin-sama. It is a comic line, and it carries more than the joke. A standard Japanese dictionary gives shujin, the word at its centre, several senses, and two of them sit close to this film: the person one serves, such as an employer, and the word a wife uses for her husband when she speaks of him to others. The title takes a word with both of those senses in it and hands it to a woman who is talked over at work and whom a man asks to take charge. It is a small inversion, whether or not anyone intended it, and a viewer in Japan may hear it before she has seen a single scene.

There are at least four ways this reading could be wrong, and the first is the strongest.

First, the word may not have belonged in that room at all. A safeword stops a scene, and there was no scene. The contract’s term had run out; Ji-woo had walked out on its last night. The meeting was not play, and what Ji-hoo said there concerned his own job and his own feelings. One person can ask another not to sacrifice himself; she cannot command him, outside anything they agreed, in the matters of his own life. On this account he did not override her consent to anything done to her. He declined to be governed where their agreement did not reach. Much of this should be granted, and it is why this essay has not called what he did a violation. Two things remain. Whatever she meant by it, she reached for the one word they had agreed nobody would argue with, and he knew what it meant. And what he said was not only about his own life. He took over her defence and spoke for both of them, in public, in a room where she was being harassed. On this reading, the word he set aside was her attempt to keep hold of her own voice there.

Second, the override may be the film’s point rather than its lapse. Ji-hoo has spent the film hiding, and if the weight was in the keeping, his declaration in front of the managers is where the keeping ends. A man ashamed of what he wants says, in the worst room imaginable, what he wants and whom. That is the heart of the film, and it deserves to be honoured. The question is only whether the end of his secret had to be made out of the setting aside of her word. The film chose to make them the same act. That choice, not his courage, is what this essay questions.

Third, it is a romantic comedy, and the declaration in front of everyone is one of the genre’s oldest climaxes. Holding it to the ethics of the practice the film depicts may be a category error. Partly granted. But the film raised the standard itself. It took the trouble to explain what it was showing, with a narration to help, and it wrote a safeword into its couple’s contract. A film that teaches the word has to accept being read by it.

Fourth, this essay may be ungrateful. Love and Leashes is a rare mainstream romantic comedy that shows kink as something agreed, and reviewers credited it for exactly that; one found it more about respect between two people than about sex. To spend so long on its last act may be to punish a film for trying. That is fair, and the essay said at the start that the film’s best idea is real and rare. It dwells on the last act because what happens there is easy to miss inside a happy ending, and because a reader who has taken in the best idea deserves to see where it stops.

And one more, which this essay cannot answer: it may have misread what she wanted. Perhaps the word meant: do not sacrifice yourself for me. Perhaps his going on meant: I will not let you protect me either. What she felt in that moment is hers, and this essay does not claim to know it. What it can say is what the film offered its audience: a picture in which a woman’s one absolute word was outweighed by a man’s love, and the picture was called happy. Pictures travel further than any one couple.

Three things, none of them a rule.

Writing a wish down is where consent can begin, not where it ends. A contract can make a desire sayable, give it terms and an end date, and name the word that stops it. It cannot listen. The listening is done by a person, each time, in the moment, and no document can do it for them.

Consent to each other is not consent to an audience. A risk of being seen is not a permission to be heard. The film knows this when the recording is of its lovers and forgets it when the recordings are of its villains, and a reader can keep the first half without the second.

A word for stop means something only if it is not argued with, and love can be an argument too. There is an old sentence that goes: I know you said stop, but I am doing this for you. It is still an override when it is said tenderly.

So, once, to you. If you have ever said stop, in whatever language and in whatever room, and been answered with love, with trust me or with I am doing this for you, you were not being difficult. You were using the one word that is supposed to end the discussion, and it was yours to use. Being loved is not a reason for your word to be weighed. And if there is a wish you have kept out of sight for years, the film’s best scene is still true: the right listener can make it lighter. The right listener is also the one who stops when you say so.

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it describes no practice anyone should follow.

Is there a word or a sign you trust to stop things? Has anyone ever weighed it instead of hearing it?

When someone overruled you for your own good, who decided what your good was?

What part of your life would you want kept if an office, a family or a group chat heard it by accident, and who has already shown you that they would keep it?

Where do you apologise for being good at something, and has anyone mistaken the apology for an offer?

If you have ever put an agreement in writing, what did it depend on that no paper could hold?