Secret Sunshine

밀양 [Miryang] (Secret Sunshine) 2007 South Korea Criterion (142 minutes) written and directed by Lee Chang-dong.

This long, intense film makes for a compelling story because its givens—beautiful surfaces and a cast of characters and situations that mold readily to easy assumptions—bend with human nature and develop in unexpected ways.

In doing this, writer-director and novelist Lee Chang-dong accomplishes what Anton Chekhov wrote successful plays and fiction do: properly frame questions for readers to discover their own solutions, rather than supply answers.

Miryang, the name of the southern South Korean city where the story takes place, is a Chinese place-name (密陽) which means ‘secret sunshine.’

Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon), a young widow, moves with her small son, Jun (Seon Jung-yeob), to this provincial city 350 miles from her native Seoul. Her idea is to make a new life for herself. Shin-ae has never been to Miryang, but tells everyone she meets that her deceased husband was a native and always said he wanted to return.

Her motivation is to take control of her life and to make what hurts stop hurting. ‘Secret sunshine’ also could characterize the solace of a revelation or ‘enlightenment’ that she seeks to heal and make herself whole.

Shin-ae’s ‘new beginning’ turns out to have the feel of one of those schemes that sounded great while cooking it up on one’s own late at night staring at a black window in a city apartment. By the end of the story she is fighting just to awaken from the relentless nightmare her life becomes.

How this drama plays out is best seen afresh. Watching the story take shape is like watching someone pulling open a complex origami figure, with an occasional view of where a telling fold had been made. What follows are observations on the characters, acting and direction.

The film opens with a view of a cerulean summer sky through an automobile windshield, possibly from Jun’s point of view in the passenger seat. Shin-ae’s car is broken down on the shoulder of a highway outside Miryang. The first person she meets after waving down help is the tow truck driver, automotive garage owner Kim Jong-chan (Song Kang-ho).

Jong-chan is an overgrown boy. He is unmarried at age 39, oversized and overfriendly, booming with a hale good cheer, curiosity, humor and undiscriminating tastes. Were he Italian-American, he is the kind of man other male Italian-Americans would refer to with humor and affection as ‘that fucking guy.’

Though not a character actor per se, Song Kang-ho evidently is well known to Korean audiences for his ‘good old boy' roles, perhaps a little like a younger Korean Tommy Lee Jones. He plays Jong-chan with relish, and reportedly a good local dialect and mannerisms.

Director Lee said in an interview for Criterion included with this feature that many of the actors are local stage and nonprofessional actors he cast to make the story more authentic to home audiences. His film is filled with a range of beautifully rendered smaller roles and vignettes that provide a rich, universal context for his story.

Jong-chan’s cheerful small-town macho bonhomie only annoys the refined reserve Shin-ae cultivates to hold strangers back. She keeps Jong-chan at arm’s length; his homely presence reminds her that she is a sophisticated Seoul native stuck with this yokel in the sticks. Her frosty hauteur does little to diminish or discourage his good cheer.

Shin-ae does not appear to have financial worries. She finds an apartment, enrolls Jun in a local school, starts a storefront ‘piano school’ for children, and lets it be known that she is interested in buying land on which to build a new house. The attractive, affluent young widow who puts on airs gets everyone in the neighborhood talking.

Jong-chan takes an active interest in her. Park Do-seob (Cho Yeong-jin), her son’s new teacher, himself a family man, seems like a positive role model. Neighborhood pharmacists Kim Chip-sa (Kim Mi-hyang) and her husband are born-again Christians who sense her need and are ready with medicine not made by the hands of men.

But things start not to add up. Once settled in Miryang, Shin-ae does not make any effort to contact her dead husband’s family. When her brother Lee Min-gi (Kim Young-jae) visits her from Seoul, we find out that she left Seoul without telling anyone, even her father. And her husband, killed in a car accident, had been having an affair and considered leaving her.

We learn eventually that she conceives her life stymied by dominating males we never see: a disapproving, demanding father and an unsympathetic husband in her past, which later roll into the inscrutable Christian God.

Shin-ae apparently grew up in constant conflict with her father. She trained as a musician, against her father’s wishes, but gave it up to marry. She had a child, but marriage and motherhood turned out not to be solutions either. After her husband’s death, she moved to his remote hometown to try to get her bearings back—a provincial backwater in this male-dominated culture.

One problem may be that Shin-ae may never have had ‘bearings’ to begin with. Lee said in the Criterion interview that he encouraged Jeon and Song to experience rather than try to express their characters’ emotions in order to get the strong performances he wanted. This is what makes the movie’s givens—the beautiful surfaces and a cast of characters and situations that mold readily to easy assumptions—bend with human nature and develop in unexpected ways.

Shin-ae’s difficulties with male authority inspire her resistance to help offered by Jong-chan, a kind of trickster figure. Curiously enough, Jong-chan has a disapproving, demanding mother in the background whom we only hear nag him on the telephone.

Where our first view was remote blue sky, the final shot is a Chekhovian sunlit patch of muddy earth at the edge of Shin-ae’s small cement-surfaced back yard.

The heart of this film is the interaction of Jeon and Song, virtuoso soloists who find diametrically different but complementary values in Lee’s complex score. Jeon received the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 for her Shin-ae, a role strengthened by its contrast with Song’s indelible Jong-chan.