A ju teuk byul han son nim
South Korea,
2006, 99 min
Shown in 2007
CREDITS
- dir
-
Lee Yoon-Ki
- prod
-
Lee Yoon-Ki, Yun Il-Joong, Oh Su-Sung
- scr
-
Lee Yoon-Ki
- cam
-
Choi Sang-Ho
- editor
-
Jeong Kwang-Jun
- mus
-
Kim Jung-Bum
- cast
-
Han Hyo-Joo, Kim Young-Min, Choi Ill-Hwa, Kim Joong-Ki
- source
-
Cineclick Asia, 3F Incline Bldg., 891-37 Daechi-dong, Gangnam-gu, 135-280 Seoul, Korea FAX: +82-2-538-0479. EMAIL: jennyhan@cineclickasia.com.
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Lee Yoon-Ki attended.
OTHER
Bo-Kyung, a young woman living in Seoul, is asked by three men to accompany them to their village and impersonate their prodigal sister whom she resembles, thus fulfilling their dying father’s last wish to see her one more time. Once ensconced in village life and her new “family,” she encounters the initial animosity of mourning relatives and questions the morality of her role-playing. However, she soon gets caught up in the perpetration of her deception, learning how to behave and dress and what to say so that the man can reconcile with his “daughter” and die peacefully. Lee Yoon-Ki’s narrative probes the complexity of relationships within the family, revealing how familial connections have become fragile and empty. Affected by this strange experience, Bo-Kyung returns to the city and tries to reconnect with her mother. This story about the city, the country and the family—and the girl who is caught within this triangle—continues the exploration of solitary women seen in Lee’s previous two films (This Charming Girl and Love Talk), but here he uses the theme to portray the eroding bonds among family members in the modern world. In doing so, he draws a sharp picture of Korean society today. In an almost Hitchcockian sense (of Vertigo), the film also is about the process of performance—the title alone suggests this—and about the ways in which deception sometimes reveals the truth.
—Roger Garcia
FACTOID #88
Steve Cochran, the American actor who starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1957 SFIFF entry Il Grido, demanded a private screening of the film before it could be shown to Festival audiences so he could ensure that scenes that had been censored in Italy had not been cut from the print. Cochran, who had American distribution rights to the film, got a screening’delaying the film’s 8:30 start time for ticketholders.
