YNOT at the Movies

I went to a prescreening of a South Korean film "Sa Kwa" (사과) today. It's pretty bad. It's like a day time soap opera about love, romance, and family.

Hyun-Jung is a young woman (although she doesn't look young in the film) just broke up with her boyfriend. She was heartbroken, and began to date Sanghoon who has been chasing her. After they got married, she couldn't find the love she needs, so she divorced this guy and went back to her old boyfriend.

Well, we all know that South Korean have been producing love/hate drama like Detroit produces SUVs. If the casting is done right and we observe the chemistry among the leads, the drama might work. I have seen plenty of them and sometimes even addict to these South Korean doses. But this film doesn't work, because it tells a love story that nobody cares nor understands.

The film shows Hyun-Jung was all happy with her boyfriend first, but out of the blue, suddenly her boyfriend broke up with her, for no reason. I keep thinking the movie will come back to this point and reveal some explosive detail to make sense of everything. Nope, the script doesn't know what's going on either. Then the film shows how desperate Sanghoon is to have a date with Hyun-Jung, because Hyun-Jung is the "prettiest girl in the office building" (hardly!). But then after they got married, Sanghoon wants to be away from her. Why? We don't know, nor does the film. So all we see is this miserable Hyun-Jung suffers. She doesn't know what she wants. When she does know what she wants, she can't get it. We can even tell from the very beginning that Sanghoon and Hyun-Jung don't have chemistry together, so why did Hyun-Jung marry him?

However, Hyun-Jung's mom is probably the only well written character in the film, everyone else is a big disappointment, both in real life and in the film. And if you want to go and see this film, you should know ahead of time that title "Sa Kwa" (사과) means both "apple" and "apology" in Korean. Oh, who cares?

My rating: 4 out of 10.