Lee Meixian | meixian@nus.edu.sg
the ridge transmedia
A NUSSU Publication
The story of Secret Sunshine revolves around Lee Shin-ae, a young, recently-widowed single mother (Jeon Do-yeon) who moves to Miryang, South Korea, to start her life afresh. When a terrible tragedy befalls her son, she is overcome with inconsolable grief and seeks refuge in Christianity. But an unexpected turn of events shatters her faith, and her fury at God leads her to rebel and wage a personal war against Him.
Directed by Lee Chang-dong, one of Korea’s leading filmmakers, this is a gripping and unsettling film about the vastness of a human being’s capacity for suffering. In the new and foreign town, we see her trying to fit in but standing like an outsider on the peripheries, like a specimen under the townspeople’s scrutiny. When she loses her son, she goes on a roller coaster ride from despair, to optimism and faith, then downhill again to irrepressible derangement and a suicide attempt.
This is an unexpectedly dark and horrific psychological thriller, capable of frightening you enough to reduce your field of vision to the slits between your fingers. Besides depicting trauma, it also explores religious themes like evangelism and Christianity.
It debates the sincerity of the Korean Christian community’s intentions, as their portrayal shifts from being a phony, overtly cheerful bunch of over persistent evangelists, to a truly enlightened congregation who have found peace, and then back to the former again. Yet, it does not impose impressions on you. Later in the movie, the church’s continual perseverant prayers for her recovery even in her absence invites alternative interpretations of their goodness – genuine, or feigned?
Secret Sunshine is what Miryang means, translated directly into Chinese. Director Lee calls Miryang a little-known crude miniature of a big city where salvation can still be found. “Not because the reality is particularly beautiful or meaningful, but because there has to be a reason why we must continue living, even inside this crude, gloomy city,” he says. Then, as an afterthought, he adds, “If God exists, then this is what God would say to us. And that’s the story I wanted to convey.”
The film’s ending seems to dangle on an unfinished note, but perhaps even this is apt, this telling of a story with no real end. One could perceive it as analogous to life: the healing from a trauma that is never truly complete and the way life goes on with the same uncertainty.
Other merits of this film include its cinematography and the acting involved, most especially Jeon’s, who won Best Actress in Cannes Film Festival 2007 for her role in Secret Sunshine. Its cinematography, from the rustic suburbs to the dim interiors of the piano academy (Lee’s workplace) and neighbourhood streets, is stunning in itself. Also noteworthy is the colours of the film – warm and sprightly against the darkness of the unfolding story.
What this film ultimately leaves you with is empathy for the fragility and strength of humanity, so impossibly admirable that the only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It is a question of survival, and the fullness of it, how much you could hold, and how much you could care.
This is actually quite a nicely written review! Good job.