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"I’m sorry to tell you this," the sister-in-law of Hong Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu) tells him. "But I really don’t like you at all." She speaks for everyone — his brothers, his mother, and anyone watching the movie. And there’s over 90 minutes to go. It’s not Jong-du’s fault that he’s mentally disabled, his inane laughter and painful mugging punctuated by annoying tics. It’s the director’s. Lee Chang-dong probably had earnest intentions in making this love story between two unfortunates, and that’s only part of the problem. He combines grotesquerie and sentimentality, kitschy fantasy and grimy pseudo-naturalism (must every camera set-up be from behind a pile of garbage or a sink?) into an especially toxic form of kitsch. At the film’s beginning, Jong-du has just been released after serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for vehicular homicide. His first impulse (after being arrested for not paying a restaurant tab) is to track down the surviving family. There, before he’s given the bum’s rush, he lays eyes on Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), the victim’s daughter. She has cerebral palsy, which means her tics and mugging are 10 times worse than his. He’s smitten. Sure, the relationship is off to a rocky start when Jong-du fondles his beloved’s feet and then sexually assaults her. But that just breaks the ice; more tasteless ordeals are to follow, a dreary desert of bathos without an oasis of irony. In Korean with English subtitles. (132 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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