Chunhyangdyun

There is nothing bland or pastel about Korea. It's traditional decorative colors, like the contrasts in its seasons, are vivid. In adapting social and political mores, as in the flavoring or food, Koreans tend to take things to extremes. South Korea, with its advertisements on pedestrian overpasses and across the bottom of the television screen, is in many ways more commercial and capitalistic than the archetype for such things, the United States, and its Christians are among the world's most fervent. North Korea, as we well know, has outdone Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung with its rigid communist orthodoxy.

Korea's national epic, the intensely romantic Chunhyang story, a tale better known in Korea than, say, Cinderella in the West, takes place in an old Korea that was almost a caricature of Confucianist China. The king was a complete autocrat and the social order was extremely hierarchical. Confucian norms, however, were supposed to ensure that the despotism was an enlightened and high-minded one. One could not be a part of the ruling bureaucracy without passing rigorous examinations that required knowledge of the Chinese classics and an ability to employ them in artistic expression along strictly prescribed lines. Education and refinement were supposed to translate themselves into wisdom and virtue in public administration.

Although the lower orders may never have had it very good, for the most part the system worked. Strong, stable dynasties ruled for centuries in China and Korea, but no system created by man can guard against all human frailties. The temptation to abuse the power acquired through rising in the governmental organization was great, and Chunhyang, the "Cinderella" of this classic tale, runs afoul of one of the abusers. In the process, two Confucian requirements come into conflict with one another, loyalty of the wife to the husband and loyalty of the subject to the king or his duly vested agent.

This is not a straightforward David and Bathsheba, story, however. There is just enough ambiguity in the husband-wife relationship to make it a close call for Chunhyang as to which loyalty should prevail. To her worldly courtesan mother it's not a close call at all. She counsels the easier route. But our heroine takes deeper counsel from within herself and follows the harder path that we know, as generations of Koreans have known, is in closer accord with universal moral law.

To say more would be to give away the plot, but one wonders, with such a chastening tale as this as a part of their heritage, how any Korean officials could succumb to the temptation to abuse their authority and engage in corrupt practices. But East or West, the flesh is still weak, and the tale still needs retelling there as much as it needs telling here.

Plays as we know them were unknown in Korea until the first decade of the twentieth century. The Chunhyang story was typically performed by a single p'ansori artist. P'ansori, which is quite foreign to the Western ear, is a sort of stylized chant in which the rasping tones of the performer help convey the setting and the emotion of the characters. The "singer" is accompanied by one other person who occasionally interjects exclamations and encouragement but mainly keeps time with a small barrel drum. P'ansori performers had to undergo even more rigorous training than opera singers in the West, though the purpose seemed to be to tear down the vocal cords rather than to build them up. A single P'ansori performance, lasting sometimes as long as eight hours, was a prodigious feat of stamina and memory. Thought to have grown out of the shaman performances of the southwest province of Cholla, p'ansori was acted out by both men and women. For most of the twentieth century the art form was kept alive mainly by kisaengs, or females of the roughly-translated "courtesan" class of which the Chunhyang character was a part.

In the later twentieth century in Korea, while p'ansori was taken up by a broader spectrum of society interested in preserving Korea's traditions, the Chunhyang story was brought to the public in play, opera, and repeatedly in film form. In the early 60s, an Irish priest, a professor at the Jesuit Sogang University in Seoul, even wrote and directed a critically-acclaimed English-language Broadway-style musical version of the story.

Director Kwon-taek Im for the first time combines p'ansori and drama in this latest film version. In so doing, he has produced an authentic work of art worthy of a Yi Dynasty scholar-official. Also, in the best Korean tradition, he has gone Hollywood one better at tugging at our heartstrings. The Korean audience on the screen applauds the p'ansori artist at the film's conclusion, and the audience of which I was a member, in a full opening-night movie theater, found itself joining them spontaneously. I think you will, too.

Note: Don't be alarmed when the opening p'ansori monologue lacks English subtitles. They'll come soon enough. To provide them at that point would give away part of the plot. That's not a danger for the native Korean speakers, all of whom would know the plot by heart.

I am a Korean linguist and use Korean movies to keep up on the language and have really fallen in love with them over the last few years. My current favorite is JSA, followed closely by Shiri. I just happened to catch Chunhyang on the Sundance channel and it was just not your typical "everybody dies" Korean dramatic movie. Although, what little I know of Korean culture seems to portray life as always having misfortunes,because thats just how life is, this movie was a pleasant surprise. It was kind of like Romeo and Juliet who forgot they were supposed to die. The "panjori" was excellent as well.

Introductory lines extracted from its trailer: "It will take you to a place you've never been and wrap you in a life time you've never lived. It is a story of a governor's son favored by birth-right, and a courtesan's daughter, Chunhyang, marked from birth. beautiful, sensual, innocent, brought together by love, bound by loyalty, but torn apart by law. their life became their legacy until their names became legend." A film of epic beauty and eternal devotion of a broken heart that cannot be divided and a heart that cannot be taken where"

There are a number of lines I found particularly worth meditating and deep thoughts. I didn't think this film would be a great film especially judging from its opening introduction where chants with singing were all I heard. Of course then I must remove the mentality of what a movie should be like set by Hollywood. Having done that, Chunhyang as well as the movie, has taught me a great lot of moral values, and wisdom, and not to mention loyalty. The number of people devoted to marriage and love these days are on the declining slope and it is in my opinion that modern thinking is to be blamed. However, these are two very different contexts. Truly, Chunhyang, is a very 2 hour inspiring film, in a different way from Hollywood.

Its musics are as though playing with the strings of my heart. oh my god, so good! Enjoy!

With the Korean story telling tradition performed on stage, it was a interesting and novel way to tell the story. The story was beautiful and the moving. I figure it to be a Korean fairy tale given its happy ending and having a moral to the story.

I didn't find the story telling method completely successful. The music and drumming added tension to the film, but the Pansori seemed to intrude in the film too frequently, describing everything that is going on when it could be done visually, rendering many scenes as some sort of announcement, not letting the ambiance set in. The scene of the whipping seemed to be a little forced, having the camera show us various audience members crying, as if we don't know this is a dramatic situation. It might have worked better if they let the dialogue be spoken by the character Chunghyang instead of the Pansori, since the Pansori does not have much dynamic range in his voicing, being always loud. The character saying it while being whipped gives a different impression than the Pansori screaming it.

But all in all, still a good film.

I stumbled into Chunhyang through a teaser on Sundance Channel today. The story is a variation of a timeless theme of forbidden love found and lost. Or is it lost and found?

The presentation includes a staged classical Korean theater performance where a singing storyteller and a drummer (Pansori) act as the narrator. His singing punctuates and accompanies the visual story and dialog.

I was afraid that the acting would be too stylized and therefore distracting, but it was very believable and engaging.

Having recently become interested in Korean history and culture through their pottery, I was familiar with some of the images, values, and traditions, but the beauty of the costumes, architecture, and scenery were strikingly beautiful and compelling.

I'm looking forward to seeing this again. It was so visually rich that I'm certain it will continue to be a source of beauty.