Faith, Morality and Forgiveness in the Face of Great Tragedy
A stunning performance on both of their parts.
I have reposted this review I had done for Lucid Screening in honor of Lee’s new trailer.
Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (Miryang, 2007) opens with a stream of sunlight coming through a car window. Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon), a recent widow, and her young son Jun (Seon Jung-yeop) have broken down on the side of a road while moving to her husband’s hometown of Miryang, a small city in the southeast region of Korea. After flagging down a passing trucker she gets help from Kim Jong-chan (Song Kang-ho) the boss of a local car repair shop who helps Shin-ae find a place to start her piano school and live. Soon, unimaginable tragedy strikes and we follow Shin-ae as she finds faith and loses it in her desperate struggle to keep going.
To be fair, I am a huge fan of Lee Chang-dong and his literary style of filmmaking. Peppermint Candy is perhaps one of my favorite films and I even met the director (briefly outside of a theater) during the Korean film festival that was held at Lincoln Center in 2005. That being said, I cannot say I loved this film, it is far too brutally depressing to be an object of desire (or an object of the repeated viewings I give to his other films). This film affected me physically while watching it and I actually had to pause it and breathe for a few minutes to avoid having a panic attack. This has much to do with Jeon’s amazing performance for which she deservedly won the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 2007. Her portrayal of a woman going through a long and painful breakdown never dips into the histrionic melodrama that populates other Korean films. Even Song gives what I think may be one of his greatest performances, even though his role is largely just to follow Shin-ae. He is far from a main character. This is Jeon’s film, and his character at first seems like the comic relief with his strong accent and slightly oafish mannerisms (his mom is constantly berating him on the phone for being a loser). However, he is looking for his redemption in Shin-ae, just as much as Shin-ae looks for hers in the Christian church. In another, different film Jong-chan might be the hero, the perennial nice guy who helps out a friend in tragedy and finally gets a happy ending. But this is not that movie.
This is Lee’s most realist work and Cho Yong-kyou’s cinematography (largely filmed in handheld CinemaScope) is composed in such a way that the composition becomes invisible. The film is populated with ordinary Koreans doing ordinary things. If you ever want to know what living in a small city in Korea looks and feels like, this is a good alternative to the $1200 ticket. The pacing of this film reflects this realism. Yes it deals with a great tragedy, but it is also filled with the same little moments of quiet and repetition that life is. This also makes the film difficult to watch, there is no catharsis and it is hard to separate out the fact that you are watching a narrative film. I was drawn into the film through its slow but insistent pacing and could not extract myself out of it. There are lots of stories in this film, just as there are in real life. And as in real life, there is no answer to the tragedies that befall our heroine. In many tragedies there is a moment that serves as a catharsis for the audience allowing us to cry, but feel hope that everything will be okay in the end. This film does not allow us to have that moment and because of this it stuck with me for several days after the movie.
The film opens with a beautiful shot of the sky and sunlight streaming through a car window. Its ending shot is a mucky corner of Shin-ae’s backyard fenced with cement bricks and strewn with trash. We know as filmgoers that this signifies the end of the film, but the characters are still left to struggle to hold on to whatever sanity and happiness that they have in the left. I was left feeling brutalized by this film. It is a film with many stories and moments that beg to be described and analyzed but to do so in a review would do a disservice to those who have not seen the film. It is a film that may anger some viewers for the way it directly questions faith, morality and forgiveness in the face of great tragedy yet offers no answers. Do I recommend it? Yes, but it will not be enjoyable. Even the beauty of Cho’s images is not enough to rescue the viewer from the emotions that you will feel watching this film.
