Sometimes, a form of cruelty emerges in morality tales featuring rich men who wed poor women. Consider the sadistic acts inflected by the Marquis of Saluzzo on Griselda in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or the sliced-off heel and snipped-off toes in The Brothers Grimm's "Cinderella." Ouch, right? That twisted aspect also pops up in Lee Byung-il's The Wedding Day, a cinematic fable in which a female servant — infatuated with the bride-to-be — marries the wealthy suitor when the family patriarch coerces her to take his daughter's place after being tricked into believing his future son-in-law has a limp. Yet rather than being overjoyed by a life of luxury, our handmaiden looks depressed when taken away in a palanquin. The only one truly happy by the switcheroo is her new husband and his brother-in-law, the traveling scholar who cooked up the scheme.
And so... The father-of-the-bride is now humiliated. The bride herself will never find a good match. The mother-of-the-bride realizes her hubby's a moron. Even the local worker who'd hopelessly pined for the servant-woman remains despairingly single at the end. Perhaps grandfather is happy. He's senile and clueless and unflappably giddy. But the main players, outside the groom's family, are universally screwed and sad.
That said, The Wedding Day is visually appealing, with plenty of elegantly composed long shots and countless sartorial touches to delight the eye. Too bad that this film is ultimately a deflating romance nastily mocking disabilities. The circle of dancing young ladies who ridicule the purported handicap in a sing-song fashion is especially deplorable. May they be spinsters for the rest of their lives.
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