A Korean screening title, a quartet, and a fictional country

The notes write about the film Death and the Maiden, shown in Korea under the title Sigourney Weaver’s Truth, and directed, they say, by Roman Polanski. They call it a film with a theatrical quality, and with both thrill and feeling. They do not give a year. It opens, they write, on a middle-aged couple, with a string quartet; Schubert’s Death and the Maiden wraps the beginning and the end of the film, and the same music is also heard, later, over the radio, as the early facts of the plot are laid out.

The setting is a fictional country in South America. A military dictatorship has fallen, and a new government has taken its place, but the atrocities of that period remain as wounds. A proper inquiry into those acts has not been carried out, and as public demand for one rises, the protagonist Gerardo is appointed chair of a truth commission.

Paulina, Miranda, and a confession about power

Paulina, they write, had been taken by the secret police during the dictatorship, for her work against it, and had been cruelly tortured. She is married to Gerardo, yet she still lives with that memory. By a chance mishap, a doctor who has done Gerardo a kindness comes to the house, and the memory returns. She had been blindfolded at the time, but she says she remembers, without missing a part, the voice, the smell, the way of speaking, and the laugh of the person who tortured her, and she presses that doctor, Miranda, as the man who raped and tortured her.

She would have liked him to suffer as she had suffered, they write, yet she tells him that if she can only hear the truth, she will let him live. The film, in their watching, keeps the question of who is telling the truth and who is lying at its center. Between Paulina, who insists on guilt, and Miranda, who insists on innocence, Gerardo can be seen working faithfully as a lawyer, under the presumption of innocence. A scene they single out is the one in which Miranda at last speaks of what he did while drunk on power. The notes add that Paulina’s claim is close to a personal conviction; in a real court, they write, Miranda would likely have been found not guilty. In the last scene, at a concert, Paulina and her husband are there, and Miranda has come with his family as well.

A victim’s rights, and a question the notes will not close

The writer is not satisfied that Gerardo stayed neutral enough toward Paulina, the victim. The offender’s rights, they feel, were protected, while the victim’s were not. In real life too, they add, a victim’s life may be laid open in the press, while a suspect’s face and voice are covered. They understand a lawyer’s role as a duty to protect everyone’s rights, and to help a judgment that fits the law. In a brief last thought, they also write that Miranda, even if he is the offender in a narrow sense, can himself be felt as a victim of a structure of power.

The notes then turn, briefly, to other cases the writer has in mind: the rights of women who suffered as comfort women under the Japanese military, and the question of how to assign responsibility for acts done under a structure of power, as in the mass killings of the Nazi regime. They leave those questions open, rather than settling them. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ account of Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden, screened in Korea as Sigourney Weaver’s Truth, including the names Paulina, Miranda, and Gerardo

Last updated: 14 November 2026