One Day Off (2023) Episode 3

May 26, 2023

This episode of One Day Off (or Park Ha-Kyung’s Travels) opens with Ha-kyung in a movie theater, locking eyes with a stranger in the row behind her (the same man at the end of the previous episode).

On this week’s one-day trip, Ha-kyung visits Busan for the international film festival. She stops at a cold noodle restaurant and deliberates about what to order. When she leaves, she bumps into the man she saw in the theater. Like Ha-kyung, he is uncertain what to order.

Later, she visits a bookstore and sees him again. She spies on him from behind a bookshelf and looks at what he is reading, and buys the same book, “The Destruction of Love.”

At a café, Ha-kyung reflects on how her students used to always write about love, but not anymore. Then, a woman sitting nearby calls her lover and tells him how much she misses him. Ha-kyung puts in earbuds to avoid hearing it.

As she walks through a train station, the man appears again. This time, he walks alongside her and glances at her. When they get to an outdoor theater, he finally speaks, asking if she was at the noodle restaurant. They chat about the noodles, and he echoes her thoughts from earlier: places like this aren’t in Seoul, or maybe they are just hard to find. They enjoy the film together, and he introduces himself as Lee Chang-jin.

Later, they stand together on a public balcony overlooking a bridge, but then he disappears. Ha-kyung looks around for him, but he is nowhere to be seen. As she is leaving, he suddenly runs after her, telling her that she left him. But she insists it was he who disappeared. Somehow, they lost each other, even though it seems impossible. They walk and chat together, making plans to meet at 10 the next morning, and he excitedly hands her some mandarins before running off and shouting, “Let’s cross paths tomorrow!”

She tosses and turns all night. When she wakes up, she air-dries her socks, apparently not having planned ahead to stay another day. She goes to the theatre and waits for Chang-jin, but it’s past ten and he hasn’t shown up. She ends up watching the film alone and boards the train home, looking at the mandarins in her lap.

A week later, she finds a cold noodle place in Seoul, enjoys a bowl, and leaves. Chang-jin walks in just minutes later and orders the same noodles before looking into the camera and saying, “Cut!”

In a train station somewhere, a man tries to buy a ticket from an automated machine but gives up, looking around for a young person to help him.

The Episode Review

Each episode in this series is a surprise. This episode is bittersweet and a little more cinematic than the prior episodes, with some beautiful shots and ideas. For example, when Chang-jin disappears, it seems like Ha-kyung had imagined him all along.

Ha-kyung and Chang-jin are such kindred spirits, but somehow, they just weren’t meant to meet again (at least in this episode).