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Actress Do-yeon Jeon captivated me when she played a sad scene in 'Secret Sunshine'. Her acting in that moment was so good I felt grief. For it, she became the first Korean actor to win the Cannes Award and, many years later, the first Korean actor to be a judge at Cannes.
Jumping back to her early career was juxtaposition because 'Happy End' begins with a 3-minute sex scene. My heart-breaking memory of her was replaced by her perfectly naked body. Bye-bye intellectualism and praise the Koreans for being quicker to undress than the Japanese.
But the movie became much more than a hard-on. It's one of the few that are good from the region prior the millennium. It left me melancholic because I identified with all the characters in the love triangle.
Admiring the subtle yet powerful handling of the film, I wikipediaed that the director was Ji-woo Jung, he who made the tasteful and insightful lolita drama 'The Muse'.
Interestingly, last year he made the generic 'Tune in for Love'. It broke the Korean box office record for a romance, with 173,562 admissions on opening day. Although Public taste will never be en masse for art, I'm pleased because a worthy director will now have the cash to make more movies I like. I can hope that there will be another 'happy ending'.
score 7/10
wickedmikehampton 16 December 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6369453/ |
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27-3-2021 18:06:09