"A Woman Must Obey Her Husband"
The opening short of Shin Sang-ok's Women of Yi Dynasty omnibus is the South Korean equivalent of a Roger Corman fright flick. The acting is amateurish; the camerawork, erratic; the lighting, flickery; the script, clunky. Character development takes second place to a morbid plot worthy of Edgar Allan Poe: A chaste young woman is married off to a rich family's crybaby son then must suffer in silence when her young groom dies on the wedding day. Her one attempt to escape to see an ailing mother does not end well.
"The Seven Sins of a Wife"
Film number two continues the "woeful woman" theme as well as the drab cinematography. Married to a sterile man, a fruitless first wife (Choi Eun-hie) coerces a simple-minded, gnome-like servant into having sex with her so she can pass off their offspring as a legitimate heir. The catch is that she's not fooling anyone but her husband and he's the only one who gives a damn.
The final entry in this trilogy has a much brighter palette with its vibrant blues, lurid yellows, and overripe reds as well as a much more upbeat ending: The main woman, a court lady who is raped outdoors then suffers through various attempts to induce an abortion (like throwing herself down a snowy hill, bathing in a freezing river, and ingesting poison scraped off a stone), ends up leaving the palace alive — if in a casket — with her baby safe beside her. As for the baby's father, well, let's just say this mother's friends are overprotective.
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