| The Scent | |||||||||||
| Native Name: |
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| Director: | Kim Hyeong-jun | ||||||||||
| Producer: | Choi Jun-yeong Lee Min-ho | ||||||||||
| Music: | Yuta | ||||||||||
| Cinematography: | Choi Young-taek Yun Tae-gi | ||||||||||
| Editing: | Kim Sun-min | ||||||||||
| Studio: | Trophy Entertainment | ||||||||||
| Distributor: | Showbox | ||||||||||
| Runtime: | 117 minutes | ||||||||||
| Country: | South Korea | ||||||||||
| Language: | Korean | ||||||||||
| Gross: | [1] | ||||||||||
The Scent (; lit. "Man Who Waits for Adultery"; also shortened to) is a 2012 South Korean comedy-thriller film starring Park Hee-soon and Park Si-yeon.[2] [3]
Kang Seon-woo is a detective specializing in adultery cases. One day, he investigates the scene of an incident only to find two dead bodies. The only witness is Kim Soo-jin, the dead man's wife. Seon-woo inadvertently become a primary suspect and struggles to prove his innocence.[4]
For the past two years, while on suspension for adultery with a police chief's wife, detective Kang Seon-woo (Park Hee-soon), has been running a private-eye agency specializing in adultery cases. He's also being sued for divorce by his wife, Hye-young (Cha Soo-yeon). A couple of days before resuming his old job, Seon-u accepts a case from a woman, Kim Soo-jin (Yoon Jae), who wears a particularly alluring perfume. She says her husband, casino billionaire Nam Yeong-gil (Jo Won-hee), is conducting an affair with another woman at a love hotel in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi Province, outside Seoul. Seon-woo checks into an adjoining room in the unmanned hotel and is met there by Soo-jin. Instead of immediately surprising the lovers, Soo-jin invites Seon-woo to a drink and seduces him. Seon-woo wakes up next to her dead body, and in the next room finds the husband also dead. The woman there says her name is also Kim Soo-jin (Park Si-yeon) and the dead man is her husband. Along with his idiot assistant, ex-con Gi-poong (Lee Kwang-soo), Seon-woo cleans the crime scenes and buries the bodies, realizing he's been framed for the double murder. Resuming his job at Jonggu Police Station, Seon-woo investigates the case along with two colleagues: the stubbornly procedural Seo (Kim Jung-tae), who dislikes him, and the easy-going Han Gil-ro (Joo Sang-wook), who admires him. Seon-woo has noticed that Soo-jin wears the same perfume as her dead namesake, and she admits she wanted a divorce from her husband, who used to beat her. Seon-woo questions the dead Soo-jin's boyfriend, gym trainer Lee Jin-guk (Kim Yun-seong), but the trail leads nowhere. As the terrier-like Seo comes up with more evidence that could eventually implicate Seon-woo in the murders, Seon-woo finds himself falling hard for Soo-jin and on a deadline to solve the mystery.[5]
About her radical nude scene, Park Si-yeon said, "When I first got the script, there was no exposure scene and I did not know that I had to go naked in front of the camera until we started filming. It was tough as I have never done such thing before, but I had several heated discussions with the producer and my co-star Park Hee-soon about these scenes and we did it."[6]
Despite somewhat negative reception from film critics, the film performed strongly at the box office.[7] In total the film sold 1,246,185 admissions nationwide,[8] with the success of the film largely attributed to Park Si-yeon's numerous nude scenes.[9] [10]