MY HEART (1999)
Directed by: Bae Chang-Ho
Starring: Kim Yoo-Mi, Kim Myeong-Kon, Yoon Yu-Seon, Nam Jeong-Hee
Director Bae Chang-Ho launched the Korean New Wave in the 1980's and may just be the most influential Korean director alive. Foregoing his typical urban cool, My Heart is an epic story of female resilience set in the 1920's, starring the director's wife (Kim Yoo-Mi, who also co-wrote the screenplay) and shot by Song Haeng-Ki, one of the two cinematographers responsible for Lee Myung-Se's mind-blowing Nowhere to Hide.
At sixteen, Sun-Yi (Kim Yoo-Mi) is married off to a ten-year-old brat and grows into adulthood the miserable daughter-in-law to his family. Treated like a slave, her cloistered life finds her scrubbing floor after floor, their lacquered surfaces stretching ahead of her like an endless road to an early grave. Set at a time when traditional Korean culture was vividly alive, My Heart feels like just another "women got it tough" period piece until she picks herself up off the floor and strikes out on her own, the camera following the strange path of her life wherever it may lead. A plain Jane, Sun-Yi is no hero, nor is she a victim. She's just a woman leading her life her own way, a life that many of us wouldn't even notice. But as it passes by, year after year, it weaves a story that seem incongruously rich next to the soft-spoken woman leading it.
The closest reference for Western viewers is Zhang Yimou at his best, crafting an artful melodrama out of glowing washes of primary colors. Director Bae even filmed his movie over nine months in order to capture each of the four seasons at its most beautiful. Shimmering colors — candy counter pinks, yellows and greens — fill the screen from one side to the other with nature playing supporting actor to Sun-Yi as she moves from household, to forest, to plains, to frozen ice field.
The director's response to increasing globalization, this is his attempt to put the Korean soul onscreen. The Korean title of the movie, and the concept at its heart, is the difficult-to-translate "jeong" . More of a communal feeling than an individual one, it's the sense of shared fate among members of a group that makes them feel responsible for the actions and welfare of one another. Members of a small village will feel this, and the director seems to be saying that even outcasts, as Sun-Yi eventually becomes, feel this for one another.
Through marriages, deaths, children, friendships, hardship and being ostracized, My Heart follows Sun-Yi as nature rises up around her, and as the years of her life tick by, her inherent decency being the only thing she can depend on. The movie was poorly received in Korea, but has gone on to be the hit of several foreign film festivals, winning a fistful of audience awards in the process. This heady brew of traditional Korean culture, hallucinatory colors, and the good heart at the center of this movie make it a film that carries you back to a simpler time when you can shut off your cel phone, lean back in your seat, open your eyes and be riveted by the story of one person's life.