Synopsis:
Tae-Hee is a working professional living with his father, whose illness caused the break-off of his wedding. He takes a sudden vacation to Cheju Island for five days before deciding whether to accept an assignment overseas. Upon his arrival , he runs into Young-seo, a local tour guide, whom he aids in capturing a pickpocket. Eventually, Tae-hee asks her for a private tour of the island. They cover every nook and corner of the island as if they were two old lovers revisiting their first meeting place. Their affection for each other grows. At the end of the five days they part from each other without any confirmation of their love, and a series of mishaps result in their not being able to contact each other. Soon, Tae-hee must make a decision about his future. [Courtesy: Aard71@adc]
Review:
As a white guy from the United States writing about South Korean cinema, I am always cautious of making sure I am not depicting Koreans and Korean cultures as something exotic when writing about their films. I take pains to address the unfortunate Eurocentric Mis-Education of Adam Hartzell that is a result of growing up throughout the successful and unsuccessful battles of the cultural wars within my particular hamlets of the United States. It appears that Jo Myeong-ju is aware of this tendency within some of her fellow Koreans as well, that is, Korea's own special variation of exoticism towards the multicultural spectrum throughout South Korea, because such is demonstrated in her screenplay for Love Wind, Love Song. The debut feature for director Park Dae-young, the film follows a time in the life of Young-seo (Ko So-young -- Beat, A Day), a Cheju Island native who hosts bus tours of the island for visitors. Her banter with the tourists begins by stepping into Cheju dialect, and her use of humor often involves jokingly, yet not so jokingly, asking the tourists to be matchmakers for her with their sons back home. Her mother and a local cop repeatedly warn Young-seo about mainland men, claiming those relationships will never work out, although each has their own personal reasons for emphasizing a pessimistic perspective on such intra-national, cross-cultural relationships. Outside of her tours, Young-seo stumbles upon love at first sight with a mainlander from Seoul named Tae-hee (Jang Dong-gun -- Friend, Tae-gu-ki) who is traveling alone, a fact perfectly in sync with his present life perspective which limits his options in his career as well as for romance.
As a popular vacation spot for South Koreans, Cheju Island natives are apparently just as at risk of being exotically typecasted as Koreans might be by Westerners. The film plays around with the dialect differences while countering displays of the touristy spots with equal de-romanticizing of these "exotic" locales. Tae-hee encourages Young-seo's offer as his personal tour guide, but in his refusal to get too close, he also refuses to use her as an image of some place of mystery, desperately wanting the intimate, human connection he feels his fate won't allow him to have. The most striking incident of de-exoticism involves the revisiting of a Red Cap ad for Cheju Island tours in the Seoul airport which fills up the screen, making Yeong-seo look insignificant in opposition. The subtitles translate this sign as declaring Cheju Island, "The Island of Love and Fantasy!" When Young-seo stops in front of it, you expect the girlfriend to return later to throw a brick at it -- as is actually done in Christmas In August and When I Turned Nine - to smash through the luminescent lie.
Although interesting in what it says about mainland South Korea's perceptions of Cheju Island natives, I found myself unimpressed with this film when simply considering its general entertainment value. Considering its willingness to investigate a topic worthy of further exploration, I'm hoping that poor subtitles have a lot to do with my response to the film, because the film is too often boring and, well, annoyingly cheesy. Commendably, Jang and Ko do what they can with the script they've been dealt, but the film drags too much for me. This is not a patient, contemplative film like Park Ki-young's Camel(s), but a weak portrait of stars-not-crossing lovers. Although Young-seo's friend's cliched, romance guidance is eventually critiqued as just that, cliched, the subtitled dialogue presents a weakly laid out drama. And even if the poor subtitles excuse is valid, the scenes at the English language school are just too heavy-handed in their placement within the plot to provide depth to the film, and the weak series of missed connections just had me wishing the film would end as quick as Park's next feature, the differently poor, but thankfully short, Just Do It!, so I could get on with more fulfilling films. Park apparently didn't learn as much as he could have from assisting Kim Hong-joon on Jungle Story, because this film desperately wanted to be a contender as something uniquely South Korean. But the topic, unfortunately, wasn't utilized for the full entertainment and expositive value it could have provided. [Courtesy: Adam Hartzell@koreanfilm.org]
Information about the Movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0297472/
Cast: Dong-gun Jang, So-young Ko, Jae-seok Han, Na-na Han, Jung-ki Kim
Directed: Dae-yeong Park.
Genre: Drama.
Runtime: 97 minutes [ 1 hr. 37 min].
Also Known As: Yeonpung yeonga.
Country: South Korea.
Language: Korean
Subtitles: English, Chinese (.sub, .idx format)
Technical Specification about the Movie:
Source...............: NTSC DVD5 Rental
File Format..........: AVI
Codec.................: XviD
Bit Rate...............: 1 951 Kbps [overall], 1 816 Kbps [video], 128 Kbps [Audio]
Resolution............: 704 X 528
AR.......................: 4:3
Frame rate...........: 23.976 fps
BPP......................: 0.204
Codec.................: AC3
Bitrate.................: 128 kbps
Stills from the Movie:
