Kwon Chil-in Double Feature:
Singles (2003) -- Although this is in essence just a procession of well-worn clichés (with a twist here and there), it works beautifully. It's so light as to be almost frothy, despite hovering around some potentially weighty issues. It even pokes fun at itself in a couple of places; when Na Nan (Jang Jin-yeong) has been dumped by her boyfriend and disconsolately wanders out to a bus stop, she thinks to herself "in the movies, this is where it always rains," which it promptly does. That may sound sappy, but this scene and others, and moreover Jang's entire brilliant performance, make this a bright, lively relationship comedy and prevent it from turning into just another emotionally heavy melodrama. There are parallel storylines, given approximately equal weight. One follows Jang, a quirky would-be fashion designer on the verge of turning 30, who is having a career crisis while at the same time entering cautiously into a relationship with a Prince Charming she met by chance. The other follows her friend Dong-mi (Uhm Jeong-hwa), also having a career crisis (although hers is decidedly less passive), whose very active and free love life is suddenly sidetracked when she
impulsively sleeps with her close friend/roommate and gets pregnant.
Even though no new cinematic ground is broken in either story, both play out beautifully, and I recommend this film highly.
Hellcats (2008) -- Evidently trying to duplicate and expand on his success with
Singles, Kwon badly misses the mark in his third feature. Rather than two equally-weighted and interesting stories,
Hellcats (the Korean title translates to
Some Like it Hot) crams
four separate stories into its two hour running time, with only one of them given any depth at all. The stories center on an unorthodox family of unorthodox women sharing an apartment: a 40-year-old (Lee Mi-sook) who is unexpectedly entering menopause; her teenage daughter Kang-ae (Ahn So-hee) whose struggles to interest her ambivalent boyfriend lead her to question her own sexual identity; and her (much younger) sister (Kim Min-hie), who is (stop me if you've heard this before) a quirky would-be screenwriter having a career crisis while at the same time entering cautiously into a relationship with a Prince Charming she met by chance. The story of how these three women interrelate might have been interesting, but it's dusted off in two or three short scenes of them bickering or otherwise failing to connect. From a screenplay perspective, they may as well have been strangers in three apartments; this is an opportunity missed. The wonderful Lee Mi-Sook is completely wasted in her abbreviated story, which really leads nowhere. Kang-ae's story holds the most promise, and is very daring by the standards of mainstream Korean cinema, but like her mother, she's mostly relegated to the sidelines, popping up in short scenes with long gaps in between. (Kang-ae's character could be thought of as a maybe-bisexual version of Jia-Jen, the youngest daughter in Ang Lee's
Eat Drink Man Woman, who is similarly given short shrift by her director.) Most of the film is devoted to the lively and engaging Kim, and she's quite good, but her story and role are almost identical to those of Na Nan in
Singles, right down to the details (both Prince Charmings, for example, make and begin to execute plans to take our heroines to the US where they won't have to work and can return to school, thus resolving their career crises). Na Nan's story was engaging, but not enough for a second go-round; and even if it were, there's no way Kim could hope to compete with the effervescent Jang, who won her second Blue Dragon Award (national Best Actress) for her role in
Singles, becoming a national sensation in the process.
Sadly, Jang died earlier this month at the age of 35 (37 in Korean reckoning); she had suffered from stomach cancer for the past year. Even her death played out like a Korean movie, with an
improbable love story at its center. I expect the studios are already dickering for the film rights to her story. I suppose that if Kwon ends up directing the inevitable movie, Jang will be portrayed as a quirky actress struggling with a career crises while at the same time entering cautiously into a relationship with a Prince Charming she met by chance. And it might even work.
