Secret Sunshine

I've waited to see this movie for a long time and at last I could manage to see it in Istanbul Film Festival. Maybe because I expected too much from this film and that's why i was slightly disappointed. I was not the best movie from Korea but still it is really worth watching.

The subject was nice and the film makes you keep watching without getting bored though it is long. But there are gaps in the movie and you jump from one point to another. However, the acting of Jeon Do-Yeon is incredibly beautiful. It was was one of the best performances in the early cinema history and I think this movie wouldn't be that nice if she was not in the leading role.

Initially, I would have thought that Secret Sunshine had something critical to say of religion (and here being Christianity), and wondered if it would be something of a rant against the ills of blind faith, or the manipulative power of those who are supposedly holier than thou. Surprisingly, it was none of the sort and was largely non-judgemental, putting in place events as a matter of fact, and allowing the audience to draw their own judgement and conclusion.

And I can't help but to chuckle at the role of Song Kang-ho, a man who's taken a liking for widower Shin-ae (Jeong Do-yeon), and starts going to church when she does. The reasons for church going are many I suppose, either to find inner peace, to seek help, being afraid of eternal damnation in the fires of Hell, to reaffirm faith, or even things like wanting to get married in a church, or to skirt chase (I kid you not). But to each his own reasons for turning up in church every Sunday and participating in prayer groups for fellowship, what is indeed dangerous, is when the underlying ulterior motives, do not get satisfied, and that's when frustration sets in. Or when you discover how hypocritical man can be, portraying one face inside the house of God, and displaying yet another outside.

Shin-ae and her son Jun moves to the town of Miryang, which is the birthplace of her deceased husband. Wanting to start life anew, she opens up a piano shop to give lessons, though in discovering her new found freedom and in a moment's lack of good judgement, has another tragedy befall her. And that takes one hour to get to. Secret Sunshine really took its time to get to this point, where things then begin to get slightly more interesting with Shin-ae now taking to embracing religion to deal with and accept her current state, reveling in the comfort that religion, and fellow believers, can offer.

What began as crying out for sympathy turns into acceptance and belief that religion offers that silver bullet to solve the ills of all mankind, and sometimes you wonder if it's because of your personal myopic view of what the almighty is doing for you, that you begin to adopt a somewhat selfish opinion that everything's good going your way, and in Shin-ae's case, her magnanimous attitude in wanting to forgive others who had trespassed against her, forgetting something very fundamental that it the feeling can cut both ways too.

The last act is probably the most fun of the lot as it says plenty, where most of us can identify with - why me, and why not someone else, as we rage against our faith and start questioning, unfortunately, with no hard and fast answers available. It is then either we fall by the wayside, or continue with destructive deeds so rebelliously. But somehow the plug gets carefully pulled in Secret Sunshine so as not to offend, and what could have been an ugly character mouthpiece, got muted.

If you bite into the hype this movie is generating, then perhaps you'll realize only Jeong Do- yeon's excellent portrayal is worth mentioning, as she totally owns her role as the widow Shin-ae who is probably the most unluckiest person on Earth in having to deal with that many tragedies over a short period of time, and if you look at it carefully, most of which are of her own doing. Watching her transformation, is worth the ticket price, and despite having my personal favourite Korean actor Song Kang-ho in the movie, this is something he just breezed right through.

For me, it was difficult to endure through the entire movie as it is very long and not uplifting. The main character Shin-ae is in almost every scene but she is not a like-able character. She is a selfish mom who put her son in danger by pretending to be rich when she isn't and leaving her young son by himself in the large house she is renting in a town she just moved to. We find out that she moved to this town as it was the birthplace of her unfaithful ex-husband who died in a car crash. We later find out that Shin-ae resented her mother who hit her with a spoon and denied her schooling in a music program. But the moments that explain Shin-ae's mental state are too brief. Instead we are shown endless scenes that don't add to the story, just a bunch of scenes with Shin-ae acting recklessly and everyone around her tolerating her. A large amount of time is spent on her experience with Christians and Christianity. It ends with her questioning how God could forgive the murderer before she could and her breaking the the window of the pharmacy couple who try to help her. The mechanic character played by the famous Song Kang-Ho from Parasite does not seem real. Who in reality would put up with her? The son character is the most uplifting one and the young child actor does a great job with his portrayal. Song Kang-Ho also brings lightness and humor. The main character is shown without any makeup with unstyled hair throughout the entire movie. Actually, no one in the movie wears any makeup. Everyone is shown with ordinary clothes and hair styles. I think the Director was trying to make this movie look like a documentary. Even though this is an acclaimed movie, I think a movie should be entertaining. This was not. This should have been edited down with more emphasis placed on her past that explains her current actions and cut out all of the vomiting scenes. She vomits so much, I thought the character was pregnant.

Lee Chang-dong's exceptional "Secret Sunshine" is the single most emotionally ravaging experience of the year. It is an instantly sobering, brutally honest character piece on the reverberations of loss and a graceful memento mori that resonates with a striking density of thought, yet remains as inscrutable as the emotions it observes. Through its layered naturalism and stunningly trenchant view of small-town dynamics, Lee implicitly deconstructs the traditional Korean melodrama by pulling apart the cinematics of excess and ripping to shreds the arcs that shape its characters and grounds the proceedings into a crushing grind of stoic realism.

"Secret Sunshine" remains an immensely compelling, fluid work throughout its 142-minute runtime. Its bravura first hour is filled to the brim with subtextual insinuations, remarkable foreshadowing and adroit reversals of tone brought about by humanistic capriciousness. Adapted from a short story, Lee infuses the film with his sensitivity for the sublime paradoxes of life, last seen in his transgressively comic and irreverent "Oasis". Understanding how personal revolutions are forged when views of our universe are changed, Lee not only sees the emotional cataclysm of a widow's sorrow through an inquiring scope but also feels the tumultuous existential currents that underpin the film when religion becomes a narrative scapegoat in comprehending the heinousness of the human experience.

Do-yeon Jeon's ("You Are My Sunshine") Best Actress accolade at Cannes in 2007 is well deserved. Her performance as the widow Shin-ae remains an unrelenting enigma. As a character pulled apart by forces beyond her control, the sheer magnificence of this performance is central to the film's turbulent nature. With Jeon essaying one cyclonic upheaval after another, there's a tremulous sense of collapse that the film, to its credit, never approaches. Instead it finds a delicate balance that saps the charged theatricality and subsequent banality from ordinary tragedies and its fallouts. She becomes the centre of the film's universe as well as ours. Filmed in glorious hand-held CinemaScope, the film demolishes the cinematicism of frames and compositions by becoming visually acute just as it is quietly harrowing when the camera never relinquishes its gaze from Shin-ae through times of happiness, guilt and remorse.

Lee captures the details of life in the small, suspicious town of Miryang – the awkwardness of communal situations, its uncomfortable silences and its devastations spun out of personal dramas. Shin-ae's interactions with the townsfolk rarely inspires dividends, especially when they are merely done out of obligation to fit in for the sake of her son, Jun (Seon Jung-yeop). The one recurring acquaintance is Jong-chan (Song Kang-ho), a bachelor mechanic of uncertain intentions who helps her en route to Miryang in the film's enchanting open sequence set to a captivating stream of sunlight. Song has situated himself as a comedic anti-hero in South Korea's biggest films but his nuanced, low-key delivery here purports the director's thought process of never having to reveal more than plainly necessary.

If pain is ephemeral, then grief can never truly dissipate. And Lee finds complexity in subsistence. When Shin-ae attempts to head down the path of reconciliation only to be faced again with unimaginable heartbreak, she unsuccessfully employs the fellowship of evangelical Christianity as a foil to her sorrow. But Lee knows better than that when he understands that religion, in the context of the human canvas of strife and misery, is never a simple solution. But Lee never rebukes the essence of religion as he realises the value of salvation for some through a higher power even if it serves a form of denial in others. The scenes in its latter half which deal with religion doesn't allow itself to become aggressively scornful, which is a feat in itself considering how many filmmakers let the momentum of the material take over from what they need to say to be true to its story and characters.

Lee's first film since his call to office as his country's Minister of Culture and Tourism is an uncompromising dissertation on human suffering. In a film so artless and genuine, it arduously reveals that there's nothing as simple as emotional catharsis, just the suppression and abatement of agony. "Secret Sunshine" leaves us with tender mercies pulled out of evanescence, and points towards a profound understanding of despair and faith.

If you've had drama in your life, either your own or by someone close to you, the stages of pain this woman (but, in my opinion, it could easily have been a man too)goes through are very very real. It is a movie about not being able to cope with your pain, about not knowing what to do to help yourself get through it. Obviously it then also is a movie about not knowing how to help someone close to you get through their pain. It is a movie that makes you realize that everyone is alone in their suffering. It is a movie that might push someone over the edge...which hardly sounds like a recommendation. I'm not sure I would recommend someone to go see this film, especially someone close, but for me...it is a movie that puts things into perspective, that shows real pain, and is therefore much relevant to being alive. It makes you realize that hey, you or the person close to you have lived through pain, that hey, all the things you worry about now are of so little importance