Haepi-endeu

I'll admit, I started looking at this movie only because Ju Jin Mo happened to be part of the cast, after watching him in 'A frozen flower'. Brace yourself for the opening sex scene, it left me baffle and in a state of total denial to the very end.

A word of advice, don't be fooled by the title. Though the storyline was strong, there were certain plots that had would have you thinking, like whose the real father of Yumi? . . . Enough said, overall I enjoyed it, although I was HAPPY about the ending.😊😱😌🙉

Pretty insane to think that FL's actress was the same person that recently did Crash Course in Romance. ML's actor was in Old Boy, as well. This was a very solid movie in the "romance noir" genre, apparently. I have to say that I was glad not to have seen the poster, because that would have kind of ruined the surprise, whereas while watching the movie I was able to really be "fooled" by the writer's plot.

I really liked the movie stylistically, great attention to details. Though we didn't get flashbacks explaining what happened in the past, everything was hinted at as if we found ourselves "in the middle of things", to create the ambience.

An excellently performed movie about our age of the equality of the genders. If men lose their jobs and their wives have wild affairs can a man forever hold his horses? An original story with a touching motherly daddy who knows when enough is enough...

I only recently realized that Jung Ji-woo also did the kdrama series Somebody... I can certainly see where the tendency to plot twist and surprising endings came from. Another similarity, I guess, is the sexually explicit nature of the work, and the way the sex was actually instrumental in conveying something about the atmosphere that would have been hard to show in other ways. In other words, this is really not a situation where the sex was instrumental or there for fan service purposes, in my opinion: it was part of the characterization. Not as central as in a movie like Lust, Caution, but still... not gratuitous, contrary to other comments I had read.

This was really a top example of the genre, the genre being "amour noir". It knows its tropes and plays with them, and subverts them when it wants to. In some sense, there is a sense of inevitability as in a Greek tragedy, in another sense one doubts the realism of the conclusion and feels that the events came a bit out of left fields given characterization and stated goals, and that they were basically bent into the plot for the sake of shock value... but none of that really detracts from the work's value as a genre film, so it gets full marks in that respect, as far as I am concerned. Well done to the director and actors, not an easy movie.