View image Song Kang-ho ("The Host") and Cannes 2007 best actress Jeon Do-yeon in "Secret Sushine." The use of pastel blues and pinks in this movie is... disturbing.
Lee Chang-dong's "Miryang" ("Secret Sunshine") begins with a CinemaScope view of a wide-open landscape beneath a big blue sky, and ends looking into the dirt of a tiny urban courtyard, in a corner with cement bricks, a discarded plastic bottle, a rubber hose, congealed muck and mud. How it makes that trajectory I am not going to say -- although, if you were unfortunate enough to read the Toronto Film Festival catalog entry about the film (say, with an eye toward making a decision about whether to see it), you'll find the film's single most shocking plot development revealed at the beginning of the third paragraph.
This is criminally unfair to the audience, and another reason why, as I wrote recently, I like to know as little as possible about films before I see them, and engage in my due-diligence research afterwards. You don't realize how much a film can be ruined even by seeing a few images in a trailer (or production stills) in advance. It's terrible. Somewhere in your memory, you keep waiting for the images or moments to appear in the film, and too often the stuff the distributor has chosen for public release is designed to sell the picture but not to serve the audience's appreciation or experience of it once they've bought a ticket.
"Secret Sunshine" is the meaning of the name of the South Korean town Miryang, to which Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon, best actress at Cannes for this harrowing performance) and her son Jun are relocating in the first shot of the movie. That's all the story detail you're going to get from me. Like the first image (which suggests a road behind them that we only learn something about later), the final one indicates that the film is over, but that something continues. (It may also strike you as a miniaturized/essentialized recapitulation of a stunning shot of a lake from somewhere in the middle of the movie.)
The film is brave and unsparing (as is Jeon's performance) and asks some challenging and disquieting questions, among them whether human values such as love, mercy, morality, meaning and forgiveness still have meaning if we shift the ultimate responsibility for them away from human beings onto some (Christian, in this case) concept of God. What is the significance of these principles if they're viewed not in human terms but as supernatural absolutes? "Secret Sunshine" is film about hope and despair, about the stages of grief and several of the "Deadly Sins" (pride, most of all), and just how much a person can withstand (think Job) and still hang on to life, to meaning, to sanity.
It's a hard film to write about without using superlatives.
I generally just skim the first couple of paragraphs in the programme, when trying to figure out whether or not to see a movie at TIFF. Many descriptions are notoriously spoiler-filled. I tend to keep an eye out for adjectives, and generally avoid movies described as "austere" (read: you'll be asleep within 5 minutes) or "whimsical" (read: you'll go into a sugar coma).
But my big annoyance with TIFF folks occurs AT the screenings: I hate hate HATE it when programmers introduce the movie and say things like "You are going to LOVE it." I'll decide what I think of the movie, thanks.
(Also, glad to see you loved "The Orphanage" -- it was one of my festival faves as well.)
Secret Sunshine was one of the best fimls I saw at the festival. However, it disturbs me to like it so much. I always feel ambivalent about my own motivations when I "enjoy" a film in which a female protagonist is dogged by unrelenting tragedy, sometimes crossing the border into torture. Broken Blossoms, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Stella Dallas - they all move me deeply, but I question my motives; why don't I feel offended? After seven days at the fest, I am blanking on the name of the critic who wrote a similar self-examination abut her own fondness for Broken Blossoms, wondering how it could be reconciled with her feminist beliefs.
But anyway, I thought Secret Sunshine was darn good.
Jim, this is the first I've read (not the first I've heard) of Secret Sunshine, and based on the feeling I got just from reading your short piece, I'm going to do my darnedest to keep it that way.
I've sensed in the writing of some reviewers lately a slight backlash against the idea of spoilers-- the implication being that a little information about the movie's plot shouldn't really hinder your enjoyment of it. After all, it's in the way the movie plays out in front of our eyes and ears that's important, right? But it's as you say-- and we've been saying this about overly expository trailers for years-- that not only do you often get too strong a sense of the movie's narrative trajectory in a trailer, but certain imagery that should be preserved for the experience of the film gets exposed too. It may have nothing to do with "spoiling" the story because we might not know how the image fits in. But if we're sitting there wondering when that image is going to pop up, then we're not fully giving ourselves over to what the director and writer may be trying to show us or lead us to understand. My desire, as a reader, is to seek out writers who are less dependent on stuffing their paragraphs with plot information and overly detailed descriptions of sequences (and calling that filled space criticism), and my desire as a writer myself is to be able to evoke the film and my experience of it by parsing out as little of the story as possible. (Your one-sentence description of the set-up of Secret Sunshine is a template to aspire to.)
Dennis: My sentiments exactly. Having written on deadline for 30 years (about half of them for newspapers with space restrictions), I feel I can usually tell when a writer is coasting to fill space by describing the plot. That has virtually nothing to do with what I consider to be film criticism. Sure, give us the premise, maybe explain who the characters are, and if it's a genre picture (or somehow relates to genre filmmaking), give us a sense of that. Then write about what you got out of the movie, or what you thought or felt while watching it, or quote some images or lines or something you think captures the essence of what the movie is doing, and explain how and why you think that is. Write about an atmosphere the film creates, or the juxtaposition of two or more shots, or about what goes on within a particular shot. Narrative is a handy device to keep people interested, so why give away any more than you have to in order to set up the movie, for people who haven't seen it? Afterwards, I always hope they'll come back to what I wrote and understand what I was saying on a whole new level. The trick is having to write for people who haven't seen the movie at the same time you're writing for people who have.
Jim, Your comments further deepen the mystery to me of Stephen Holden's place at the NYTimes. He's all plot, with just a little bit of review around the edges.