Secret Sunshine, a 2007 South Korean film, is above all else a tale of gaining and then losing faith. It revolves around a non-religious mother named Sin-ae whose son Jun is kidnapped, and then murdered when the kidnapper was dissatisfied with the ransom. Sin-ae, who already lost her husband, is in grief, until she takes comfort in Christianity and surprisingly achieves happiness. But when she visits the prison to forgive her son's killer, ("love your enemies") she is shaken to hear he has also turned to Christianity and believes God has already forgiven him.The movie doesn't appear to be anything special before the kidnapping. When Jun is kidnapped, I was surprised that when Sin-ae is on the phone with the kidnapper that the audience doesn't hear what he's saying. The movie starts getting more interesting as a tale of faith. I'd have to say I don't quite understand why after all she's been through she comes to think of God as a loving being. She'd have plenty of reason to doubt that. But I totally understand her frustration with her son's murderer being "forgiven" for his terrible crime, before she could have any say in the matter. Anger and frustration with God is, I think, a sympathetic subject, something that Ingmar Bergman explored to a degree, although his movies were less about anger than despair with the "silence of God." The movie doesn't seem to deny God's existence, and I'm not sure it really endorses Sin-ae's disillusionment, but it offers her perspective for consideration. For many, Secret Sunshine may be a hard film to take, but it shines a light on personal tragedy and a victim's relationship with God.

A friend of mine who'd watched Milyang on my strong recommendation didn't look so satisfied. Feeling guilty of wasting her time, I took a little conversation with her and was somewhat surprised to find that she ended up being a little bit against the main female character, Shin-Ae.In the first scene, Shin-Ae's car has broken down on a highway near Milyang. Her phone call is connected to Jong-Chan, a car mechanic who has his own local shop. Jong-Chan's curiosity toward the good-looking woman tells us she lost her husband recently and decided to move to Milyang for good with her only son, Jun. If a handsome male single who meets a pretty widow shows excessive kindness from the very beginning, it's not difficult to imagine what he is thinking of her. "Because it is my husband's hometown," she answers to Jong-Chan's question why she chose Milyang. However, it is hard to tell whether she really meant the reason not only because she doesn't look for any links to her husband in town but also because nothing of Milyang seems to comfort her physically or mentally throughout the movie. "What kind of place is Milyang?" she asks to Jong-Chan looking out the car window. It was her first question in the car fixed and driven by Jong-Chan. Shin-Ae starts to think about Milyang seriously only after it appears in the eyes long after having decided to leave Seoul for good, and even after hours of long winding drives. Shin-Ae is, however, confident and spontaneous in starting a new life in a new place, but at the same time, she resists to be assimilated to her surroundings, not to mention Jong-Chan's consistent approach of affection. She is the mother of her son, Jun, anyway.Jong-Chan's kindness summons not just good wills around her. One twisted mind who runs a kindergarten where Jun is enrolled to kidnaps and kills him to make up money for his gambling debt. Shin-Ae collapses internally and externally. Her world has been lost. Now she desperately needs a real reason why, why she has to suffer so much, or the meaning of her pain. Spectators should not give much significance to the specific kind of religion, which is Christianity in the movie, or its ritual process. Anyone who's been in South Korea would know how common Christian churches are especially in urban areas. So, it is more appropriate that Shin-Ae needed a religious consolation, and it happened to be Christianity due to its wider availability in the culture.After a brief period of peace won from participating in religious process, waiting for her is one event. One day Jong-Chan drives Shin-Ae to the prison for her to meet and forgive the killer of her son despite all the discouraging of her religious fellows just because she was so determined to. She looks confident and spontaneous again before entering the interview room but comes out with unimaginable furious. All she says is a repetition of a simple sentence, "How God can forgive him even before I forgive him?" The killer told her that he also found God in jail and was forgiven by him.Now Shin-Ae seems to desperately try to follow just the opposite of the religious doctrine she learned. She seduces a married man to have sex and even cuts her in the wrist with a knife in a suicide attempt. In that way, she thinks she can win against God. Her world is so twisted that her life becomes a chess piece on the board overlooked by a tormenting super power. Meanwhile, Jong-Chan who lives a simple life never fails to show up for consistent affection for Shin-Ae and accepts even the most hysterical behavior of hers as it is without leaving her any moment. The movie ends when Shin-Ae is cutting her hair by herself in front of a mirror held by Jong-Chan, and the secret sunshine falls on a mingled trash in her yard.Milyang is definitely not a movie of vengeance or religious salvation. It is a story of our life where we tumble down and stand up as if on an endless loop. It doesn't matter whether Shin-Ae saw a possibility of new hope cutting her hair in the yard. I don't care whether Shin-Ae would marry Jong-Chan or not. I just respect both of her resilience and his consistency in life. Every shot and angle was carefully and beautifully created and woven together by Director Lee Chang-Dong. This is surely one of his masterpieces.

The most interesting thing about Miryang (Secret Sunshine) is the actors. Jeon Do-yeon, as Lee Shin-ae, the main character, is a woman with a young son whose husband has died in a tragic accident, and who leaves Seoul to live in Miryang, which was his home town, with her young son. Jeon's face is very changeable. She is girlish, flirtatious, elegant, aged and sad, desperate and joyous, with it and terribly isolated by turns, and it's all in her face. The film also stars Song Kang-ho as Kim, a man who meets her when her car breaks down coming into Miryang, who happens to run a garage in town, and who follows her around all the time thereafter, despite her apparent lack of interest in his attentions. Song is the biggest star in Korea right now, renowned for his work with Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance; Memories of Murder and The Host). And yet here he plays a throwaway character, almost a forgotten man. But of course he makes him interesting and curiously appealing. He is the essential ballast to keep Jeon's character from floating away.Lee Shin-ae is a piano teacher. She comes to the new town, which is a neutral place, a kind of poor-man's Seoul, a town "just like anywhere else," as Kim says (just as he is in a way just like anyone else). Her little boy is sprightly, as little boys are, but plainly damaged and withdrawn at times too. His father used to snore, and when he misses him he lies awake, pretending to snore. He goes to school, and Shin-ae meets parents and students and shopkeepers. There is a sense of place in the film, even though the place is in a sense "anywhere." People speak in the local dialect, and everyone knows everything, and Shin-ae's Seoul origin is immediately noticed. Is life really harsher here, away from the big city and its sophistication? Shin-ae seems not to realize the danger she is in.Something terrible happens. And Shin-ae doesn't necessarily deal with it in the best possible way. But it happens and she must face the consequences. But she can't. She goes to pieces. A perpetrator is caught, but that's no consolation. Eventually she becomes so despairing, she relents and goes to a born-again Christian meeting an acquaintance has been pressing her to attend. She finds peace and release with this. But when she decides not only to forgive the perpetrator but to go to the prison to tell him so, that experience is full of ironies and it destroys her all over again. She becomes embittered and desperate and she no longer finds solace in religion. And it gets worse than that.Jeon Do-yeon gives her all in this extremely demanding and protean role. Lee Chang-dong may be a very good director. If an actor of the stature of Song Kang-ho expresses enormous admiration for him, that is convincing. According to Scott Foundas of LA Weekly, Lee's first three films, Green Fish (1997), Peppermint Candy (2000) and Oasis (2002) have marked him out as "one of the leading figures of his country's recent cinematic renaissance." But this is not as successful a film as those of other Korean directors whose work I've seen, such as Yong Sang-Soo, Bong Joon-ho, and the prodigiously, almost perversely gifted Park Chan-wook. It may indeed begin as Foundas says as a kind of "Asiatic Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" and then "abruptly and without warning" turns into "something of a thriller, and some time after that a nearly Bressonian study in human suffering." But that progression not only seems random and indigestible; the film sags and loses its momentum toward the end and then simply fizzles out, with no sense of an ending. There are also weaknesses in the action. Shin-ae takes foolish chances with her son, and makes bad choices all along. If she is destined for madness like Betty in Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue, which might explain her peculiar and mistaken choices, that isn't something that is properly developed. This is an interesting film, certainly a disturbing one, but one that leaves one doubtful and dissatisfied, after putting one through an emotional wringer.An official selection of the New York Film Festival presented at Lincoln Center, 2007—an event that has done right by Korean filmmakers in the recent past.

A young woman comes to the home town of his husband after he passed away in an accident. She barely settles down in this small town, but shortly after, loses her little son in a kidnapping and all her hopes... This could lead to all kinds following plots in a normal movie: find a new partner and being happy finally; or depressed enough to struggle and finally kill herself... She does try to kill herself, but not after a series of severe fights, with God. She trusts in God, only to find that God seems to forgive everyone, even the killer. Well, I should be careful here about God, the movie doesn't mean a thing against God. The way the movie deals the issue is quite interesting: not in the woman's point of view or from God's perspective (in this way, there would be lots of grass growing, clouds flying views, I suppose). Rather, it's from a third party's eye, the movie let us to perceive and doesn't explain a thing.The movie wouldn't be so interesting were there only the woman. There's this man who's everywhere around the woman and obviously in love with her, but in his own way. He's a funny guy, like a clown I should say, who shamelessly hangs around our heroine. The combination of these two, the woman full of tension, crying and throwing up always, and the man, smiling and talking stupidly, ends up in a good balance of emotions: nothing absurdly wrong or too tedious.Highly recommend.