Green Sleeves

The story of the life of a hard-working woman in an advertising agency who drinks coffee continuously.

A broadcasting company hosts an actor/actress contest and 30 contestants are pre-selected. Yong-Woo and Eun-Sook are two of them and they are also lovers. Eun-Sook desperately wants to be a TV star and approaches a producer. Yong-Woo discovers this and argues with her. In the meantime, Eun-Sook happens to meet Yu-Suk and spends a night with him, after he tells her that he knows a lot about broadcasting companies.

Sang-hui has run away to Seoul from her quiet country life. She feels no regrets as she becomes nightclub hopper. In one of these clubs she meets the hard and bitter Yu-na who had suffered from many years of abuse at her father's hands. They become close friends and eventually meet a young man Yang-gu who seems to be a perfect match for Yu-na. However he is carrying a torch for a former lover. Sang-hui and Yu-na decide to hunt down and eliminate the competition...

The events that precede and follow, for each of those present in turn, when a young woman is asked for verification of her identity one time too many, in this case when presenting a check at a convenience store. Despite the repetition of the central scene the personal stories and consequences are interestingly varied and unpredictable. The problem for the central character is that her country allows her no usable identity following her change of sex. This was true for the lead actress, South Korea's most famed woman of transsexual history, Ha Ri-su, but that is about as far as the plot bears any resemblance to her actual life. Since the film was released the actress became, by a landmark court case, the first in her country to to be allowed proper recognition and papers. There are of course many other countries which still impose the same difficulties on similar young women.