The Road to Sampo: Three on a March

Evidently filmmaker Lee Man-hui was an experimentalist to the end. His final work, the improbably joyous The Road to Sampo, turns a grim-on-paper road movie into a repeatedly giddy celebration of life. I found it inexplicably irresistable. So what if it's winter and jobs are scarce and everyone's broke and the world is cruel. I've been there and there's still friendship. No one promised anyone an easy life. And in Sampo, the trio of good-natured, insta-buddy vagabonds somehow find a way to counter a litany of downturns...together. Bulldozer Roh (Baek Il-sob) can't find a job; barmaid Baek-hwa (Mun Suk) can't find love; and elder excon Jeong (Kim Jin-kyu) seems unlikely to find the life he left behind. That doesn't mean they should stop searching. Plus, if they're hungry along the way, they can always crash a funeral for food and drink.

Which isn't to imply that The Road to Sampo is a pilgrimmage with marker events. Huge swaths of the film are devoted to watching these three trudge through the snow. Sometimes, they come upon a house and you think, what's there, but they move on. It may sound boring. In actuality, it's a blast. When Jeong comments about the younger two being like children, he's basically explaining how to get through the day to day. Don't get jaded. Don't get hard. Keep your innocence. Play when you can. Approach the unexpected with open eyes and an open heart. (Best done with a soundtrack inspired by Morricone.)

A Triangular Trap: Men Are Mean

The men are universally pigs in the more-or-less misanthropic A Triangular Trap. Ugly pigs. Vile pigs. Run-of-the-mill pigs. The stalker who rapes fashion designer Choe Ji-suk (Mun Suk) — then holds her hostage for months so she'll have his baby... He's certainly a pig. So is the diabolically double-crossing self-defense instructor she's dating, despite his having saved her from a random thug with damaged lips. As for the family lawyer, he's shockingly indifferent when she recounts her life-changing trauma. Your "not all men are bad" argument will fall on deaf ears here; that one friendly neighbor is a case of the exception that proves the rule.

Not that the women come off smelling like roses in Lee Man-hui's stylishly '70s crime pic. A sister of the traveling caftan this is not. Choe Ji-suk's customers and co-workers look at her as a source of gossip and sartorial inspiration. And don't tell me the maid is a good person either, simply for doing her job well; she also spreads superstition and condemns her mistress for accepting the family inheritance. No, with jerks and Judge Judys everywhere, our heroine has two choices should she survive the attacks on her body and character: to deteriorate or to retaliate. In A Triangular Trap, she does a bit of both, taking breaks periodically to play a flamenco guitar.