Arriving right at the end-of-the-year-list buzzer, Lee Chang-Dong's Secret Sunshine serves as yet another prolonged, narratively ambitious yet focused character study doubling as further exploration of the virtues, limits and consequences of various forms of emotional expression from the South Korean filmmaker. In the director's previous film, the brilliant Oasis, a fidgety sociopath and a woman stricken with severe cerebral palsy navigated through their respective inabilities to express the deeply felt and deeply unsettling romance they shared. It remains a film of formidable vision and overwhelming bravery and a notable evolution from Chang-Dong's promising sophomore feature, Peppermint Candy.
Peppermint Candy walked backward through the years to realize what made its protagonist want to put himself in front of an oncoming train. In contrast, Secret Sunshine is completely linear and the knowledge of what causes its protagonist, a single mother and piano teacher named Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon), to debase, turn towards and eventually abandon Christianity is well known. Moving to her late husband's hometown, Miryang, with her son, Jun (Seon Jung-yeop), Shin-ae immediately begins plans to move out to the town's outskirts and build a house with money from her husband's life insurance policy. Though awkward around some town-folk and pestered by an affable mechanic, Chan Jong (the great Song Kang-ho), Shin-ae is optimistic about her new life enough to go out drinking with some local ladies one night, returning home to a call from a kidnapper demanding her entire savings in exchange for Jun.
Shin-ae's dropping off of the money is a sequence of taught emotional precision but Secret Sunshine is not a thriller, at least not entirely or by the popular definition of that exact genre. The kidnapping goes haywire and detectives escort Shin-ae to the local river to identify Jun's body, which is closely followed by the arrest of the kidnapper. Foregoing the pedestrian trajectory that would focus on manhunt and capture, Chang-dong instead begins to focus on how Shin-ae comes to handle and express her immense grief, affording several small characters that mirror and inform her choice of expression. Anger and nihilism are shaken out of her system in a stunning elongated scene where Shin-ae breaks down during the singing of hymns at a prayer service, her disbelief suddenly mutated into near-evangelist levels of faith in God.
This momentary transition would have been so easily dismissed as incredulous and patented issue-baiting if not for Kim Hyun's excellent editing and, most of all, Do-yeon's emotionally nimble and breathtakingly physical performance. The canny actress embraces every emotional turn and treats it all with gravity and great sincerity. When Shin-ae makes the terrible mistake of visiting her son's murderer in prison, being faced with the rough side of Christian faith and forgiveness, Do-yeon touches on a litany of deeply felt reactions and feelings without speaking more than a handful of words. Her raging return to nihilism, complete with adultery, pranks, shop-lifting and suicide attempts, is countered and tempered by Kang-ho's consistent buffoonery.
Kang-ho's mechanic, in fact, offers a figure far more ambiguous in his goals than Shin-ae, who very simply wants to find the same relief from somewhere that her child's killer found in God. The central tragedy of Secret Sunshine is given immense weight and focus and the film itself is far more interested in the process of coping than her eventual recovery and/or rebirth. Unfolding with Dickensian character detail and a wonderful sense of place - Shin-ae's town's name means "secret sunshine" in Chinese - Secret Sunshine is a wrenching, darkly comic and immersive work, one that maintains a singular curiosity in how institutions and beliefs often fail in their attempts to offer a blanket-style of coping to those who dedicate their life to them.
Receiving distribution three years after it had its premiere stateside at the New York Film Festival in 2007, Secret Sunshine narrowly anticipates Chang-dong's upcoming fifth film, the excellent Poetry, in which a grandmother begins writing poetry while dealing with allegations that her grandson participated in a gang rape. The vagaries of foreign distribution are often infuriating, needlessly complicated and dependent on business sense rather than artistic but every once in a while, a worthy and unique film is rescued from perceived obscurity even as new masterworks arrive to be mulled over and championed for. It's an interest that must be handled with a great deal of patience but films as moving and complex as Secret Sunshine are the generous rewards of such patience.
AKA Miryang
Peppermint Candy walked backward through the years to realize what made its protagonist want to put himself in front of an oncoming train. In contrast, Secret Sunshine is completely linear and the knowledge of what causes its protagonist, a single mother and piano teacher named Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon), to debase, turn towards and eventually abandon Christianity is well known. Moving to her late husband's hometown, Miryang, with her son, Jun (Seon Jung-yeop), Shin-ae immediately begins plans to move out to the town's outskirts and build a house with money from her husband's life insurance policy. Though awkward around some town-folk and pestered by an affable mechanic, Chan Jong (the great Song Kang-ho), Shin-ae is optimistic about her new life enough to go out drinking with some local ladies one night, returning home to a call from a kidnapper demanding her entire savings in exchange for Jun.
Shin-ae's dropping off of the money is a sequence of taught emotional precision but Secret Sunshine is not a thriller, at least not entirely or by the popular definition of that exact genre. The kidnapping goes haywire and detectives escort Shin-ae to the local river to identify Jun's body, which is closely followed by the arrest of the kidnapper. Foregoing the pedestrian trajectory that would focus on manhunt and capture, Chang-dong instead begins to focus on how Shin-ae comes to handle and express her immense grief, affording several small characters that mirror and inform her choice of expression. Anger and nihilism are shaken out of her system in a stunning elongated scene where Shin-ae breaks down during the singing of hymns at a prayer service, her disbelief suddenly mutated into near-evangelist levels of faith in God.
This momentary transition would have been so easily dismissed as incredulous and patented issue-baiting if not for Kim Hyun's excellent editing and, most of all, Do-yeon's emotionally nimble and breathtakingly physical performance. The canny actress embraces every emotional turn and treats it all with gravity and great sincerity. When Shin-ae makes the terrible mistake of visiting her son's murderer in prison, being faced with the rough side of Christian faith and forgiveness, Do-yeon touches on a litany of deeply felt reactions and feelings without speaking more than a handful of words. Her raging return to nihilism, complete with adultery, pranks, shop-lifting and suicide attempts, is countered and tempered by Kang-ho's consistent buffoonery.
Kang-ho's mechanic, in fact, offers a figure far more ambiguous in his goals than Shin-ae, who very simply wants to find the same relief from somewhere that her child's killer found in God. The central tragedy of Secret Sunshine is given immense weight and focus and the film itself is far more interested in the process of coping than her eventual recovery and/or rebirth. Unfolding with Dickensian character detail and a wonderful sense of place - Shin-ae's town's name means "secret sunshine" in Chinese - Secret Sunshine is a wrenching, darkly comic and immersive work, one that maintains a singular curiosity in how institutions and beliefs often fail in their attempts to offer a blanket-style of coping to those who dedicate their life to them.
Receiving distribution three years after it had its premiere stateside at the New York Film Festival in 2007, Secret Sunshine narrowly anticipates Chang-dong's upcoming fifth film, the excellent Poetry, in which a grandmother begins writing poetry while dealing with allegations that her grandson participated in a gang rape. The vagaries of foreign distribution are often infuriating, needlessly complicated and dependent on business sense rather than artistic but every once in a while, a worthy and unique film is rescued from perceived obscurity even as new masterworks arrive to be mulled over and championed for. It's an interest that must be handled with a great deal of patience but films as moving and complex as Secret Sunshine are the generous rewards of such patience.
AKA Miryang
