A Woman Judge: What's the Story Here?

Someone recently asked me what distinguishes Korean film. What makes it unique or special? To this, I replied: "It's penchant for turning on a dime." Hong Eun-won's wild A Woman Judge is a prime example. Initially, this 1962 movie seems to be a formulaic flick about a bright young woman (Moon Jeong-suk) fighting against societal -- and family -- expectations as she pursues her passion to be an adjudicator with an eye on the sisterhood in society. Then the movie shifts out of social justice mode and becomes about a sister-in-law (Bang Seong-ja) obsessed with getting a piano and undermining the female judge, even going so far as to set up her brother, the judge's husband (Kim Seok-hun) with a desperate, unmarried secretary (Eom Aeng-ran) who works for her feminist father (Kim Seung-ho) at the construction company. When batty, banana-crazed grandma (Bok Hye Suk) dies, however, the whole feel and focus of the movie changes once again as we're propelled into the courtroom for an old-fashion murder mystery, with the former judge as lead lawyer.

To be sure, your enjoyment of A Woman Judge demands your openness to dropping one genre (melodrama) for another (thriller) then another (courtroom drama) without judgment. Nothing is wasted as you go from one to the next: The sexist doctor-boyfriend (Park Am) will return as a helpful old friend; the disowned, addict child (Chu Seok-yang) of the mother-in-law (Yu Gye-seon) will resurface to disastrous results. Luckily, our now retired lady judge will put all that hard-earned legal training to good use when the situation demands it. Footage may be missing yet A Woman Judge is still three films in one.

Yeraishyang: The Student and the Sex Worker

We've all heard the one about the hooker with the heart of gold. Yet how about the whore with blood of gold? She's one of the leads in Jeong Chang-hwa's pleasurable melodrama Yeraishyang. How else to categorize a lady-of-the-night (Moon Jeong-seok) who saves the life of a penniless protester (Shin Sung-il) by donating her alcoholic blood for his needed transfusion? And once you've gone that far for a stranger, why not sacrifice everything else? He needs money? Sell your jewels. He needs a place to stay? Put him up for a while. He wants your love, too? Um. That's when things get complicated.

Because one is always one's dirty past as much as one is one's self-sacrificing present. In this cabaret dancer's case, that means "once a drunk, always a drunk" until she ends up in rehab at the National Psychiatric Hospital. There, she'll suffer the indignities of no makeup, no hairbrush, and an unflattering housecoat as well as the delirium tremens. She'll also emerge a new woman. Not the one who begs her boyfriend to slap her. No, she was always there. I'm talking about the embittered siren committed to revenging her dad after meeting a pipe-smoking old, Chinese man. The third act of this pulpy black-and-white may catch you offguard but it's pretty fun stuff.

The Bell Tower: Missing Another Dawn, Memories in the Belfry

When we look back at our lives can it be in any way except with sadness? For the joys of life are passing and don't etch themselves in our minds as deeply as the griefs do. In Yang Jun-nam's The Bell Tower: Missing Another Dawn, the bittersweet reflections are those of an old and ailing bell-maker (Heo Jang-kang) who experiences love and loss, not quite in equal measure. His fiance (Moon Jeong-suk) dies of appendicitis; his teacher dies of old age; what could be a career breakthrough is derailed by an old rivalry involving his grandfather. And yet, he soldiers on.

He has a new helpmeet (Moon, again), a nomadic spirit, and his craft. Fatherhood too comes into play but at a steep price. One gets the feeling every gift has its cost. And who hasn't felt that way at times. It's one of the things that redirects us back to work, to craft, to art. In a world in which the karmic balance feels arbitrarily applied by a whimisical, distracted deity, the practice — whatever that means to you — may be the place of most control. That and the telling of the story. The two are necessarily separate. And that's what makes The Bell Tower so good. Yang — Cheong Nam and Kang No-hyang — understand that the best lives are those which reconcile these two components. The work becomes the story; the story is part of the work. That work-story is generational, inherited, and by extension, bequeathed as well. Because the young have their story as well.

The Devil's Stairway: Nursed to Death

Did you think it was bad when Shelley Winters drowned in A Place in the Sun? Well, that's nothing compared to what's in store for the unwanted girlfriend in The Devil's Stairway. Lee Man-hui's hospital thriller sets up pretty quickly that the romance between an enterprising doctor (Kim Jin-kyu) and a clingy nurse (Moon Jeong-suk) is going to go sour before the spit on their lips has time to dry. And part of the fun is having Lee tease us with the possible murders that don't play out: a strangling, an overdose, another fall down that deadly staircase, an intentionally botched abortion, a grisly end utilizing various pieces of shiny medical equipment... The options are endless!

We know our hero is also our villain. But are you truly a bad guy if you're haunted by your actions? Oh, of course you are. You're just a bad guy with a conscience. Which is marginally better than a bad guy without one. How do you know he's got second thoughts? The Devil's Staircase has a deliciously insistent soundtrack with heightened foley sounds, well-placed vibraphones, and cacophonous orchestral works that drop out just in time to underscore the madness. Insanity sounds best without background music (and when shot in expert black and white).

Homebound: The Road to Return Has You Coming Back

Lest we forget, military spouses experience their own forms of PTSD. In Lee Man-hui's delectably arty, beautifully shot melodrama Homebound (a.k.a. Coming Back a.k.a. The Way Home a.k.a. A Road to Return), the protagonist isn't the depressed, wheelchair-bound veteran (Kim Jin-gyu) who's writing a serialized roman a clef for a Seoul newspaper. It's his saintly wife (Moon Jeong-suk) who has trauma-triggered hallucinations of her own — although how far they extend is really up to the viewer to decide. What we do know, for sure, is that she's responsible for dropping off her husband's latest chapter to the editor-in-chief who would like to see the story get a little more "human." By which he means, can't she cheat already?

She for her part is unsure of the answer. Will her hubby stop idealizing her sexless sacrifices? Will the oh-so-close almost-kiss she has with a rookie reporter (Kim Jeong-cheol) at a makeout bar ever develop into a duel of the tongues? Will she ever get more physical contact than what she receives from her pet German shepherd Bess? The neurotic way she applies lipstick late in the film sure suggests she needs some kind of help fast. Because if she doesn't get it, she's going to end up in Tennessee Williams country instead of Incheon.

Farewell to the Duman River: Im Kwon-Taek's Strong Start

It's kind of amazing that celebrated Korean director Im Kwon-taek's first film, Farewell to the Duman River, led to such an illustrious career. This melodramatic war pic isn't your conventional crowd-pleaser or arthouse crossover with atmospheric music in short supply, an extended chase scene fairly devoid of tension, and periodic jumpcuts that jar the viewer with no clear intent. And yet, Im's maiden voyage into moviemaking is definitely more than watchable, and not just for its feel-good story of revolutionary college students and their endless shootoffs with the Japanese.

What makes Farewell to the Duman River so undeniably delightful is the trio of actresses driving much of the action. Moon Jeong-suk plays a femme fatale supplying the rebels with needed info while Kim Hye-jung captivates as a man-hungry mountain-girl triggered into heat by the wounded hero. Neither woman is a match however for Eom Aeng-ran. In the role of the lead's pregnant girlfriend, she goes from demurely seeing her man off to war to robbing the family safe to turning the tables on an amoral uncle (Heo Jang-kang) to chasing the enemy through the snow with a machinegun and not one ounce of mercy. The gun-fight on skis got me delirious yet nothing beats a good ol' fashioned machine gun mama.

My Sister Is a Hussy: Actually, She's a Tomboy

Han Hyeong-mo's hilariously named My Sister Is a Hussy is one of those strange films that can't decide whether it's for or against female empowerment. On the pro-woman side, you have two daughters raised by their judo instructor father to be masters of self-defense. And so we get to see martial arts battles that show these young ladies beat up a pair of self-styled studs cruising in the park, an abusive husband who wants a maid for a wife, a young man practicing at the dojo, a small gang of hoods seeking revenge, and a burglar with a gun and a thirst for new clothes. These scenes are unquestionably fun. But on the anti-woman side, we have to witness the more independent older daughter body-slammed into submission by her father, accidentally punched in the face by her husband, and roughed around by that aforementioned gang of hoodlums because she's worn down and devoid of self-worth.

Even the end of the movie feels unclear in its messaging for while the female protagonist (Moon Jeong-suk) is now dressed in traditional Korean garb and playing the submissive wife seeing her husband (Kim Jin-kyu) off to work, we're also aware that the night before when their house had an intruder that her husband would've died — and the criminal would've escaped — had not this fiery young wife awakened from a knock-out punch and jumped back into the brawl. In a way, My Sister Is a Hussy wants to have it both ways: It wants the "weaker sex" to act as such even if we all know that they're stronger, smarter, and sassier. It also thinks that there's nothing more appealing than a woman who knows how to fight back. is the idea to appeal to everyone?

Stray Bullet: The Story of an Aimless Life

It's not enough to be burdened with a prostitute sister and a shiftless war vet of a brother (Choi Mu-ryong). No. Stray Bullet's protagonist (Kim Jin-kyu) has to have a crazy mother, two hungry kids, a pregnant wife (Moon Jeong-suk), and a nagging toothache too. Akin to Italy's postwar neorealist films, Yoo Hyun-mok's black-and-white, working class drama illustrates with quiet poignancy that you may follow the precepts of Confucius and be the good son, the good husband, the good father, and the good worker and still end up with a fairly shitty life. When you're poor, taking the high ground of self-sacrifice means being one small step from the gutter. Given its strong social realist message, you'd almost think that Stray Bullet was a product of North Korea. But it's hard to imagine that country's movie industry telling this downer without an uplifting Communist coda. There's no propaganda here. Instead, witness the chilling scene in which the son, a paperboy, is seen running with a stack of today's news, the cover of which is a crime committed by his uncle. The downtrodden must capitalize even the darkest of moments. When life's anything for a buck, your conscience is a cage.