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.