I just read all 16 reviews of this movie and I feel like no one hit the point at all. I'm writing now, worried that perhaps my culture shock will come off in the wrong way. I hope it doesn't. I am profoundly affected by this movie and in need of some catharsis. In the same way as movies like "Happiness" by Todd Solondz or "Punch Drunk Love" by P.T. Anderson depict characters that just keep getting more and more awkward and inward, lonely and depraved--through some nameless self-loathing and bad-luck in the first instance, and from the abuse of a family of overbearing sisters and a dreary, compartmentalized business in the second instance--I see this movie as depicting the fundamental grotesquery of modern society. I have now spoiled three movies. All three are about big cities, where life moves fast and no one cares about anyone.
So here is my catharsis. To a person in trauma, this is the world. The woman in this movie was free and fun, with a song to her voice and a playful nature with her child Jun. When a sick man takes her child for ransom and then kills her, she is broken.
Now this is how I see it, without the good-Christian bad-Christian banter. No one in the world comforted her. Surely not the man following her around looking for a wife in a widowed woman who outlived her child. I find it sickly disturbing that no review saw him as an unwanted opportunist. The church, whether witting or unwitting in this case, served the same function. With no one to comfort her, she took the fast and necessarily false comforts of a group of strangers and adopted a somewhat schizophrenic supernatural farce, always present underneath the eyes in the incredible acting. If spirituality has a place, certainly it is not to *replace* the true empathic care of an *actual person*.
These systems, the gossiping women, the possesivist patriarchy, the sexual repression, the evangelical trap, the commodification and plastification of the world. All these were the abusers of a woman who could not find solace. She prays, she hopes, she witnesses more evil, she battles God in passive-aggressive schizophrenia, she commits suicide, she fails. And she gives up.
Into the arms of a man that she doesn't love of care about.
So, it's Korean film. I haven't built up any prejudice against Milyang, Korea or the evangelical church. If people can't grieve properly, civilization eats them up. All over the world. Society makes us cold and beats us down everywhere. Remember that being human happened before all this did, when you think of God. And then remember your Nature.
Sick, twisted, life. Please, people. Love each other. Grieve and let grieve. Or the world will eat up the weak and empower the evil.
I gave the movie a 5, because if you are watching closely, there is a foreboding warning about allowing yourself to be mechanized into any sort of order: capitalist, religious, socio-normative. That is what this movie was about. Look again
So here is my catharsis. To a person in trauma, this is the world. The woman in this movie was free and fun, with a song to her voice and a playful nature with her child Jun. When a sick man takes her child for ransom and then kills her, she is broken.
Now this is how I see it, without the good-Christian bad-Christian banter. No one in the world comforted her. Surely not the man following her around looking for a wife in a widowed woman who outlived her child. I find it sickly disturbing that no review saw him as an unwanted opportunist. The church, whether witting or unwitting in this case, served the same function. With no one to comfort her, she took the fast and necessarily false comforts of a group of strangers and adopted a somewhat schizophrenic supernatural farce, always present underneath the eyes in the incredible acting. If spirituality has a place, certainly it is not to *replace* the true empathic care of an *actual person*.
These systems, the gossiping women, the possesivist patriarchy, the sexual repression, the evangelical trap, the commodification and plastification of the world. All these were the abusers of a woman who could not find solace. She prays, she hopes, she witnesses more evil, she battles God in passive-aggressive schizophrenia, she commits suicide, she fails. And she gives up.
Into the arms of a man that she doesn't love of care about.
So, it's Korean film. I haven't built up any prejudice against Milyang, Korea or the evangelical church. If people can't grieve properly, civilization eats them up. All over the world. Society makes us cold and beats us down everywhere. Remember that being human happened before all this did, when you think of God. And then remember your Nature.
Sick, twisted, life. Please, people. Love each other. Grieve and let grieve. Or the world will eat up the weak and empower the evil.
I gave the movie a 5, because if you are watching closely, there is a foreboding warning about allowing yourself to be mechanized into any sort of order: capitalist, religious, socio-normative. That is what this movie was about. Look again