ART MUSEUM BY THE ZOO (1998)
Directed by: Lee Jeong-Hyang
Starring: Shim Eun-Ha, Lee Sung-Jae, Ahn Sung-Ki, Song Seon-Mi
More than anything else, When Korean Cinema Attacks! is held together by some of the best performances to come out of Korea, mostly from women. Song Kang-Ho is the male stand-out, a stage actor whose limp haircut and blocky physicality anchor Joint Security Area and is the manic epicenter of The Foul King. But when you get to the women, the list is endless. There're the intense performances by three first-time actresses at the heart of Memento Mori (they were previously models). An Affair marks the comeback of Lee Mi-Sook, a popular actress in the ‘80s whose career, after an 11 year hiatus due to marriage, is revived by her turn as a woman disastrously coming into her own at the age of 39. My Heart is entirely centered around the weirdly compelling performance of Kim Yoo-Mi, the director's wife and co-writer. But no actress stands out in this festival like Shim Eun-Ha. Starring in Tell Me Something, Christmas in August, and Art Museum By the Zoo she's like a moon, reflecting the changing light of the film itself, waxing and waning and appearing almost unrecognizable from movie to movie. A vulnerable, nightshade, delicate and poisonous, in Tell Me Something; she delivers a prickly, naturalistic turn in Christmas in August, and in Art Museum By the Zoo she does romantic comedy as if she's the first actress to discover the form.
The movie is built around her part, which slowly but surely hijacks the flick until the movie IS her part. A wedding videographer who has sublet another woman's apartment, her life of quiet yearning for a senator's assistant (Korean legend Ahn Sung-Ki, Nowhere to Hide) is disrupted when the previous tenant's boyfriend, a soldier, shows up on leave. The two, reluctantly, become roommates and even start to fall for one other, simply through their proximity. Neither has that much to recommend them otherwise. He (Lee Sung-Jae, the leader of the gang in Attack the Gas Station) is a loud, domineering alpha male who lets his old lover walk all over him like a doormat. She's a messy, disheveled slob who refuses to have a relationship because nothing can live up to the fairy tale in her mind. She's writing a romantic screenplay for a competition and after he mocks it thoroughly, he agrees to apply his superior typing skills to it for her. It becomes a mutual project, scenes being acted out as a movie-within-a-movie, and soon we're in romantic comedy land, but somehow it looks different.
First there's the director. One of the few female directors in Korea, Lee Jeong-Hyang's movie stays resolutely on the side of our ungainly, messy heroine who never has that Ugly Duckling moment so beloved by Hollywood, but stays reliably awkward throughout. This movie was voted the most popular among women in Korea in 1998 and it's easy to see why, since expensive make-overs, pricey gowns, and simpering subservience are not required for our heroine to achieve true happiness. Then there's the male lead who's a bit of a heel. He's certainly no one's idea of the ideal mate, but there’s something about him that's appealing and there are glimpses of a nice guy hidden behind his abrasive exterior. Finally, and most importantly, there's Shim Eun-Ha. Now retired from film, here she's at her prime. The Julia Roberts of South Korea, if Julia Roberts was a better actor, watching her face waxing and waning in this movie is like watching a natural phenomenon, and she's what brings the uplift it needs.
As bubbly and sweet as cheap wedding champagne, Art Museum By the Zoo is a movie that sticks to its guns and is hopelessly in love with being in love, even in a world where love can sometimes have a runny nose.