The Girl Raised as a Future Daughter-in-Law: Ye Olde Bride

Who's the meanest woman in town? The mother-in-law (Han Eun-jin) in Choi Eun-hie's The Girl Raised as a Future Daughter-in-Law is surely a frontrunner. Category: Shrew. She's what an overly generous contemporary might categorize as a Conservative, an overbearing woman who's constantly complaining, arguing, demanding, and, insisting that her son's bride-to-be (Choi Eun-hie) submit to their future household per tradition. And just how mean is this nasty woman? Well, when the fiancee-in-waiting gets sick, new mom banishes her from home and hearth. Marriage prospects, be damned.

Lucky for our rejected woman, all the townsmen are relatively kind. Did I mention this film is a fantasy? Her working class ex (Park Nou-sik) seeks to buy her out of servitude. The clownish servant (Seo Young-choon) will meow like a cat to give her a helpful distraction. Her goofy father-in-law (Kim Hee-kap) hires a blind fortuneteller to speak on her behalf. And her betrothed (Jang Won-bae), a boy young enough to be her child, eventually defies the mean mother. Will these collective efforts shift dynamics quickly enough? After all, the prospective groom has yet to hit puberty so this arranged marriage may leave him with a new wife (nee former babysitter) about to enter menopause.

As far as age appropriate casting, Choi may have miscast herself in the female lead in her directorial debut. Yet such a decision probably ensured her the necessary financial backing. To her credit, The Girl Raised as a Future Daughter-in-Law abounds with lovely touches. Some are amusing: The young boy can't untie his sash so he pee along the road. Others are sweet: This same kid offers his ailing love a piece of taffy after she's drank some bitter medicine. Delicious!

Festival: Death Becomes Him

A grandmother (Han Eun-jin) dies at the start of Im Kwon-taek's quirky family drama Festival. Except she doesn't. She reawakens posthumously — apparently an old habit with her — but then succumbs to death, this time for good. Once she does, the funeral's intricacies begin to unfold, many unfamiliar to many Westerners such as draping calligraphy scrolls in the courtyard, painting the name of the dead on a ceremonial flag, and unmasking the face of the elaborately wrapped corpse for a late guest (black sheep Yong Sun played by a ravishing Jung Kyung Soon). Outside these Korean funeral rites, Festival has much more on its mind.

The main event is intercut by flashes of the past and vignettes drawn from a "Benjamin Button" novel penned by the late woman's son Jun-seop (Ahn Sung-ki), a celebrated author who draws inspiration from his family. This structural device blurs the line between art and reality, no doubt making the investigative work of one The Age of Literature journalist Lee Yong-soon (Oh Jung-hae) exceedingly difficult. What's truth? What's fiction? Is Ahn's character to be trusted? With all that booze flowing? Well, he's certainly dashing. And due to Ahn, a bit of an enigma, too.

Romance Gray: Two Old Men, Two Young Ladies

The movies of Shin Sang-ok are the cinematic equivalent of summer stock: You see the same actors over and over: sometimes with bad age makeup and powdered wigs; more often in typecast roles they've played before. Here Shin regulars Han Eun-jin, Shin Yeong-gyun, Kim Seung-ho, and Choi Eun-hie are all back on board for Romance Gray (a.k.a. Love Affair), a lighthearted melodrama about a pair of philandering husbands, who get caught by their dowdy wives, in affairs with two women who hustle at the local bar. The initial advice proffered at the sewing bee is that cuckqueans need to spend more time on their appearance. But these two ladies escape a fate worse than divorce by unexpected means outside the powder room.

For the wife of the college professor, the plot will involve extortion, a fake mustache, an instant photo, and some martial arts moves. For the wife of the company president, the resolution will follow a forgotten pajama top, a righteously smashed-up apartment, two boozing broads, and some runaway kids who may or may not return. Yet despite all the drinking and shouting, most folks do get back together. Just not all... And that one loose thread is what makes this a pretty darned good genre picture.

Footnote: Romance Gray's screenwriter Lim Hee-jae also wrote the scripts for Madam White Snake, My Mother and Her Guest, and Seong Chun-hyang. Kudos to him!

Red Scarf: War Hurts Women

After watching her early sloppy-drunk scene in Shin Sang-ok's war pic The Red Scarf, you're reminded how much actress Choi Eun-hie was restricted by the material provided to her throughout her career. To her credit, in many performances, she periodically pushes against the "lady" stereotype in which she's been straitjacketed but she's never quite as exciting as she was when she played that amoral hooker in the brilliant A Flower in Hell. The Red Scarf isn't a bad showcase for her talent, mind you, it's just that she'd be that much more compelling if she could rail against the military-industrial complex instead of serve it.

How does she serve? Basically, she's condemned to being a soldier's wife, not once but twice — first to a one-screw-loose pilot (Nam Kung-won) who proposes shortly after meeting her; then to his much calmer replacement (Choi Mu-ryong) who unlike his comrades has not been burdened with a nickname like "Sissy" or "Nerd."

How she gets from one man to the next is all due to the machinations of a brusque, alcoholic major (Shin Yeong-gyun) who doubles as the local matchmaker with a kind assist from the bar's good-time madam and bartender (Han Eun-jin). Yet as the adrift young woman becomes domesticated a second time, she also becomes less fascinating; and as insanely preposterous as the rescue of her second husband from behind enemy lines might be, you secretly wish the leading man had been killed so his wife could move on to husband number three or at least descend into a world of boozing and whoring and drugging and thieving. Or jumping in an airplane and becoming the first female fighter pilot in South Korean history.

My Mother and Her Guest: The High Road Leads to Heartbreak

On paper, mother (Choi Eun-hee) isn't such a great catch. She's sexually repressed, she beats her daughter, and she's so old-fashioned that she's afraid to get her hair styled in a modern cut. Even with all these shortcomings, however, you secretly hope the 28-year-old widow will somehow climb out of her suffocating shell and forge a romantic relationship with the dashing boarder (Kim Jin-kyu) who's shacking up with her, her daughter (Jeon Yeong-seon), and her mother-in-law (Han Eun-jin). Plenty of opportunities present themselves thanks to the conniving of her child, an adorable tyke who takes great pleasure out of telling little lies that add to the drama of the household. Love letters lead to a single encounter at the family well where you think the roomer and the widow might finally kiss but he's been out on a bender so she can't bring herself to taste his liquored breath. It's a night of hugs! She's a woman of principle! This is not a romantic comedy! In melodrama, the only chance an upstanding woman has at getting married depends on shame. That certainly worked for her maid (Do Geum-bong) and an egg vendor (Kim Hee-gab) who end up getting hitched after he got overly intimate with her eggs one afternoon. Chastity is a source of pride not happiness in this memorable film from director Shin Sang-ok.