Peppermint Candy, 12/16/10

[ginnycat5]

Peppermint Candy
Air: Thursday, December 16, 9:00 pm on MHz1 WNVC-DT 30.1
Future Airs: 12/17/10, 12:00 am MHz1 WNVC-DT 30.1; 12/20/10, 4:00 am MHz1 WNVC-DT 30.1
Broadcast In: Korean
Spring, 1999. On a railroad bridge overlooking a riverbank, Yong-Ho (Sol Kyung-Gu) faces an oncoming train and shouts, "I'm going back!" right before the train takes his life...Peppermint Candy takes viewers back before Yong-Ho's death, and back through 20 years of recent South Korean history. Director Lee Chang-Dong weaves an emotionally wrenching tale about the futility of dreams against the unstoppable march of time. Like Memento, Peppermint Candy unfolds in reverse, with each stop in time giving new insights into Yong-Ho and his first true love, Sun-Im (Moon So-Ri) ...A masterpiece of the Korean New Wave, Peppermint Candy is an absorbing journey through Korea's climb to democracy (including the Gwang-ju Massacre), and a bittersweet tale of what it means to be human. Directed by Chang-dong Lee, 2000, color. In Korean with English and Chinese subtitles.
Run Time: 02:30:00
Rating: TV14 Format: SD Source: YAENT
www.mhznetworks.org/schedule/

Drat, this is 2 1/2 hrs. long and doesn't start until 9pm.

[CaptainVideo]

I just finished watching this movie frankly, I'm not exactly sure what the entire thing was trying to say. If the movie weren't so depressing, I would watch it again, but I'm not sure I could go through that draining experience again right now (I have it recorded, perhaps I'll revisit it again somewhere down the road).

Anyway, does anybody have a good synopsis for this tale? I have read the description provided by MHz, but it doesn't exactly say what it the deeper meaning is. I guess, if someone could explain the reason behind his sad reaction at the end (beginning) of the movie, that might help.


Edited 12:00AM

Okay, glutton for punishment that I am (and I'm procrastinating doing another task), I watched the first hour again. Truth be told, I was dozing on and off and missed some of the subtleties, such as traffic on the frontage road moving backwards as the train goes back in time, and the tear shed by Sun-Im as she lay unconscious in the hospital. Very nice stuff. I still want to know if anyone can give a reason for his sad reaction at the first picnic.

Edited 12:30PM 5/13

Okay, I've had some time to digest this movie and I think I have come up with some conclusions that satisfy my inquiry, but not fully. As the protagonist cries out as the train bears down on him in the beginning of the film, "I want to go back!", I think that he feels that there was some watershed moment that set everything else in motion in his depressing life. I did notice, however, that several of the incidents were actually of his own doing, but this, too, seems to be as a result of events that occurred previously in his life.

He certainly was obsessed with his first love, but unfortunately, I didn't get a real sense of the true meaning of the relationship other than it was his first love. I know that she has a connection to his desire to be a photographer (which never materializes) and the theme of the peppermint candy. Other than that, I didn't get the sense that their relationship was really that important, unless it became more important after the incident in the army, but it seems that they grew apart at that point.

I thought that the fact that he was engaged in an extra marital liason at the same moment he barged in on his wife and her lover in a most violent manner was a little difficult to reckon with. Actually, it took the second viewing for the actual details of that part of the scene to reveal itself to me. Perhaps, I need to watch it again and I will gain a better understanding, but it's a really hard film to endure because of all the violence.

[ajk]

I didn't think all that much of it either. The whole piece-it-together-backwards thing is always a fun gimmick, but it just kept feeling like the pieces we needed to see weren't being shown. Too many loose ends left unaddressed, and too much of the what we saw, it was like, What's the point of showing this?

I figured that as we got closer to the end (beginning) we'd start to get a compelling story about what drove the guy to a suicidal state. A few of the events we saw obviously had an effect on him, but for the most part it just seemed like the guy was always not entirely right in the head. There were probably some cultural/contextual things that I didn't pick up on as a non-Korean, but even without those, I just never really got invested in the story. It was kind of sad, but not in a care-about-the-guy sort of way. More of an unappealing yecch-I-want-no-part-of-the-guy. Considering that the movie won awards, I expected a lot better.

Oh well, one more movie to go.

[ajk]

My mistake; this was the last movie and they started the two 16-episode series last night. Too bad; it was interesting to see movies like that (even though I only really liked one of them).