Tag: Moon So-ri

Review: Little Forest

There’s been a number of Korean remakes of Japanese films and dramas over the years, and 2018 alone has seen Be With You and Golden Slumber as box office hits. Yim Soon-rye’s LITTLE FOREST (리틀 포레스트) is actually a remake of two films from Junichi Mori, both of which were based on Daisuke Igarashi’s manga. Yet this compressed tale of self-discovery is actually ridiculously charming.

Frustrated by her life in the city, Hye-won (Kim Tae-ri, best known for The Handmaiden) returns to her childhood home in the country. Reuniting with friends Eun-Sook (Jin Ki-Joo) and Jae-Ha (Ryoo Joon-Yeol), she searches for her own meaning by farming and cooking. So much cooking.

There’s not a lot to LITTLE FOREST, even though it reduces an entire year’s worth of stories down to a comparatively bite-sized version of Igarashi’s tale. The manga creator’s work has often been compared to Hayao Miyazaki, although the unhurried structure that moves between past and present probably has more in common with Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday that it does with Miyazaki’s magical realism.

The gentle and measured pacing, a sharp left turn for screenwriter Hwang Seong-gu (Anarchist from Colony), is structured around the seasons. (In the Japanese versions, the films are actually called Little Forest: Summer & Autumn and Little Forest: Winter & Spring respectively). The two main sources of drama are a tiny love triangle with Eun-Sook and Jae-Ha, although this is forgotten with the change, and Hye-won’s relationship with her estranged mother (played by Moon So-Ri, Kim Tae-ri’s The Handmaiden co-star). “It’s like I’m always competing with her,” she remarks when cooking.

It’s the cooking that provides the most gorgeous photography though, as Lee Seung-Hoon’s cinematography lovingly capturing all of Hye-won’s food porn moments. The passing of seasons is marked by different hues used for each chapter, as well as time-lapse moments of crops growing. Lee Jun-oh’s quirky synth score adds to the gentle happy vibe.

It might be trite to suggest that LITTLE FOREST is a little film, but it never has any want to strive for anything greater than quite self-reflection. Backed by a charming performances by Kim Tae-ri, it’s wonderful to see a film where the primary outcome is something as powerful as a young woman finding her place in the world.

[stextbox id=”grey” bgcolor=”F2F2F2″ mleft=”5″ mright=”5″ image=”null”]2018 | South Korea | DIRECTOR: Yim Soon-rye | WRITERS: Hwang Seong-gu (Based on the manga by Daisuke Igarashi) | CAST: Kim Tae-ri, Ryu Jun-yeol, Moon So-ri, Jin Ki-joo | DISTRIBUTOR: Megabox Plus M, New York Asian Film Festival (US) | RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 7 July 2018 (NYAFF), 9 August 2018 (KOFFIA) [/stextbox]

July 15, 2018
SFF 2016 Review: The Handmaiden

Often over-the-top, but also gorgeously shot and erotic to the point of parody. In other words, it’s the latest masterpiece from Park Chan-wook.

THE HANDMAIDEN has one of the most threatening and inventive uses of an octopus since Oldboy. This is unsurprising given that South Korean director Park Chan-wook is the unique voice behind both, delivering his first feature film since 2013’s Stoker. Adapting Welsh writer Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, previously brought to screen as a BBC series set in its native Victorian England, Park effortlessly shifts the setting to 1930s colonial Korea in a version that is no less inventive, sexy or aware of its own turning cogs.

The first thing that will strike audiences about THE HANDMAIDEN is just how unreal the colours look. Before we know a thing about plotting or characters, Park and cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon establish the hyperreality of the piece, a necessity as they continue to push the narrative into more unbelievable places. Con man Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) recruits street pickpocket Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) to work at the estate of the mysterious heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) in an attempt to take her fortune. Yet as Sook-hee and Hideko grow closer, best laid plans take an interesting turn. Divided into three distinct chapters, the film is constantly shifting perspectives, partly to obfuscate the truth, but also to translate something distinct English into a piece that is mostly Park’s.

Excess is the name of the game in Park’s adaptation, true of many of his works, here shifting it from modern violence to sexual encounters. From the first glimpse of the manor house that forms the primary location of the film, a blend of an English Victorian opulence and Japanese elegance, iconography from both cultures pours off the screen. What amounts to a lavish ‘heist’ or ‘sting’ structure doesn’t fall to the rapid-fire editing of the genre, replaced instead with long lingering takes that allow the viewer to soak in the mise-en-scène. When Sook-hee first meets the obsessive book collector (Cho Jin-woong) that keeps Hideko captive, there’s an impressive tracking shot that pushes past a guardian ‘snake’ as the camera envelops the entire space. This slavish attention to the details of the production design would undermine the story, if not for the sense that Park and his crew have placed each thread there deliberately.

All of which might just be a well-dressed delivery capsule for the intensely erotic and equally excessive lesbian sex scenes that commence between Sook-hee and Hideko in the second and third chapters, ones that would take on a pay-per-view porn quality were they not also highly aware of their own farce. What will undoubtedly be referred to universally as the prolonged “scissoring scene” is an extended vision of two writhing female bodies exploring each other, spouting incredulous dialogue that could have be ripped from a paperback piece of purple prose, except it’s so (literally) tongue in cheek that it’s impossible to take it seriously, and nor does Park seem to want us to. Park even returns to the sequence from a different point of view in the third act, an even more heightened version of the original scene, and it’s here we realise how important the traditional roles that Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee have been playing. The innocent and mysteriously repressed archetypes have been hustling the audience, just as much as their intended targets of the sting.

THE HANDMAIDEN straddles the fine line between pointed satire and male fantasy, but also embraces its comic outlandishness at every opportunity. While diverging from Sarah Waters’ setting and plot at various key points, Park’s relocation of the film to something akin to home territory ensures that commentary on class structures and female empowerment remain firmly intact in the translation. So too does Park’s penchant for a ripping vengeance yarn, but the focus remains wholly on the individuals at the heart of the story. At times completely insane, THE HANDMAIDEN is a true cinematic experience.

2016 | South Korea | DIR: Park Chan-wook | WRITERS: Chung Seo-kyung, Park Chan-wook, adapted from the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters | CAST: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Hae-sook, Moon So-ri | DISTRIBUTOR: DreamWest | RUNNING TIME: 134 minutes | RATING: ★★★★½ (9/10)

June 20, 2016
KOFFIA 2012 Review: Leafie, A Hen Into the Wild

A charming piece of animation from South Korea has a broad appeal with its depiction of motherhood and respecting differences in others.

[stextbox id=”grey” caption=”The Day He Arrives (2011)” float=”true” align=”right” width=”200″]

Director: Oh Sung-yoon

Writer(s): Na Hyun, Kim Eun-jung

Runtime: 93 minutes

Starring: Moon So-ri, Yoo Seung-ho, Choi Min-shik

Festival: Korean Film Festival in Australia 2012

Country: South Korea

Rating (?): Better Than Average Bear (★★★½)

More info

[/stextbox]

Leafie, A Hen Into the Wild was already a popular character in its native Korea before ever appearing on-screen, being based on the popular 2000 children’s book by Hwang Sun-mi. However, the fact that it had sold over 1 million copies domestically and had been translated into several languages was not a guarantee of box-office success. Indeed, despite many of the major US animation companies using small animation house in South Korea to work on their products, local animation has often struggled to find an audience within its own market, very rarely crossing one million audience members at the box-office. This changed with last year’s Leafie, A Hen Into the Wild, which became the biggest domestic animation success in Korea with an impressive 2.2 million viewers.

Leafie (voiced by the award-winning Moon So-ri) is a cage hen who dreams of visiting the yard, and one day of laying eggs and raising some hatchlings of her own. Leafie manages to escape, and soon finds herself in the big wide world, chased by a vicious one-eyed weasel. Defended by a mallard duck she dubs Wanderer, Leafie is ultimately left to care for an egg until it hatches. Despite the child being a duck, it things she is his mother, and she cares for the baby duck she calls Greenie as though it was her own. As Greenie grows up, he and all the other animals begin to resent Leafie for being so different from the others, and Greenie is left out of activities by the pond because of it. However, when a flock of wild ducks arrives, Greenie must choose between the love of his adopted mother and his destiny.

The tale of struggle behind the production of the film is almost as epic as Leafie’s own story arc. Debut director Oh Sung-yoon worked for 20 years as an animator despite the harsh swings and roundabouts of the Korean economy, and production company Myung Films spent six years in various stages of production to bring this labour of love to the screen. The care is immediately evident, with a visual style that stands apart from anything that its international competitors are offering. In stark contrast to the 3D computer generated animation of the Hollywood productions, Leafie, A Hen Into the Wild relies on a much simpler palette and animation style. The art team’s background was in painting, and as such the entire film has a beautiful watercolour look to it, mirroring the storybook quality of the source material. At other times, the skylines are stunning, belying the 3 billion won ($2.5 million) budget. The choice of voice talent is also quite clever, and aside from Moon So-ri in the lead role, the enigmatic Wanderer is the usually sinister screen presence of Choi Min-shik (Oldboy, I Saw the Devil).

The central narrative of Leafie, A Hen Into the Wild is base don the same sense of simplistic morality as most children’s tales, although it goes to some very dark places at the very beginning and in the final scenes that take a turn for the unexpected. The sometimes repetitive nature of the tale will occasionally lessen the impact for older audiences, as the familiar bonding moments of mother and son eventually give way to chase sequences and face-offs with other animals. Yet at its heart, it is a simple story of motherhood, and tolerance to diversity, and one that almost everybody can relate to. Korean animation has been pushed out of the nest, and let’s hope it is a strong flyer from now on.

Leafie, A Hen Into the Wild played at the Korean Film Festival in Australia in August/September 2012. Full disclosure: The Reel Bits is a media partner of KOFFIA, but opinions on films are unswayed by this relationship.

August 28, 2012