ZEITGEIST

Review by Darcy Paquet

    Forever the Moment

Handball is not the most glamorous of sports, which may explain why Forever the Moment ranks as the world's first handball movie. But like any sport, it can offer up moments of drama, as when the South Korean women's handball team competed at the 2004 Athens Olympics. The efforts of the players made them briefly famous to the multitudes of South Korean viewers who were following the match on TV. The fact that four years later, a film has been made from this story, and that it has emerged as the first smash hit of 2008, is not in itself surprising. Yet this is in some ways a surprising movie.

The director, for example. Lim Soon-rye made an acclaimed debut in 1996 with Three Friends, the story of three high school graduates hesitating at the threshold of adulthood. In 2001 she followed this up with another story about men, the musical drama Waikiki Brothers. Like her debut, it earned her strong praise from local critics, but both films flopped at the box office and they never really caught on with international film festivals, either. In general, her work displays a strong interest in everyday frustrations and injustices, and a clear-eyed vision that never romanticizes her subjects -- though as viewers we share in the compassion she feels. She's not blockbuster material, in other words. Which is why it's such a surprise that she made a low-budget sports film that expresses so much of her personal style, and that it became a blockbuster.

If there are thrilling sports movies, and emotional sports movies, then Forever the Moment definitely fits in the latter category. The long prelude to the Olympics involves (for us viewers) very little handball. Lim is more interested in the characters, and how they all relate to each other. Mi-sook (Moon So-ri) is a veteran player who was a key member on two unsuccessful Olympic teams. With a young son and a husband who can't pay his debts, she gets a job at a discount mart and takes her son along to handball practice. Hye-kyung (Kim Jung-eun) has retired from playing but has been successful as the coach of a pro team in Japan. When the coach of Korea's national squad suddenly quits, she is asked to fill in -- but she is faced with an undisciplined team filled with older and younger players, and hardly anyone in their prime.

Much of the dramatic action of the first three-quarters of the film involves the changing relationships between the extended cast of characters. Some of the standard developments we expect in any sports move pass by unacknowledged, and some patience is required of us -- in a sense, we are obliged to relate to the team members as ordinary people rather than heroes in the making. When the games do start, however, our patience is rewarded with a truly gripping final reel. Director Lim is not one to exaggerate emotions, but there is no need here. Although not what you would think of as exceptional, the unfolding of the final match is dramatic and suspenseful enough as it is.

Great, climactic moments in the movies are often transformational: they vanquish tragedy and usher in Happily Ever After. But this film is too honest to suggest that that is what is at stake here. The Korean title translates as "The Best Moment in Our Lives," and while a bit sappy, it does more or less capture the point of the story. The moment is important because the players have decided to invest so much into it, even if all they will ultimately take away from it is the memory. We know that everything will return to normal soon after the game ends, and we are already familiar with the rather dull backdrop to their lives back in Korea. This juxtaposition of the thrilling sports finale and the film's stubborn realist point of view is perhaps its greatest strength. The dreams of the women are in themselves bittersweet, which is something you can't say of the average sports movie.      (Darcy Paquet)

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

    Wide Awake

Wide Awake takes one of the real-life medical mysteries -- patients who remain fully conscious (and responsive to pain) but paralyzed during operations, called "intraoperative awareness" -- and weaves a revenge-motivated mystery plot around it. (According to experts this happens shockingly more often than we think -- approximately 20,000 to 40,000 surgery patients in North America every year suffer through this experience, among whom about 30% can feel acute pain) The film opens with a young boy completely traumatized by his heart operation, the experience of feeling a scalpel cutting into his chest, a bone saw whine-grinding into his sternum (ick!), and doctor's fingers rummaging through the insides of his body. Adding insult to injury no one believes his story: it's 1980s Korea, after all. 25 years later, the doctors and nurses who had operated on him begin to die mysteriously. Ryu Jae-woo (Kim Myung-min, Sorum, Into the Mirror), a conscientious surgeon happily married to the beautiful Hee-jin (Kim Yu-mi), begins to suspect the operation-traumatized boy from his childhood is behind these deaths. The prime suspects are Lee Myeong-suk (Kim Roe-ha, Memories of Murder), stalking Dr. Ryu for failing to save his wife, and the seemingly unhinged Uk-hwan (Yu Jun-sang, Tell Me Something's second victim). The hypnosis specialist Oh Chi-hoon (Kim Tae-hoo, Epitaph) also seems to be on to some information about the culprit.

Even though a similar-themed Hollywood film (Awake, with Jessica Alba) was released a few months after it, the long shadow cast on Wide Awake is in fact that of the ultra-popular, Japanese-novel-based medical drama White Tower, through which Kim Myung-min was finally launched into the stardom that he had so far found elusive. It is not accidental, therefore, that the "medical drama" aspect of the movie is many times more fascinating than the murder mystery.

The filmmakers, including newcomer director Lee Gyu-man and co-screenwriter Lee Hyun-jin, spin their yarn as a straightforward whodunit: a crime has been committed, we are given clues to the possible motive, a load of technically complicated but authentic-sounding information regarding the exotic methods of murder are provided, and all this is nicely resolved at the end with the minimum of "what the heck?" confusion. Unfortunately, pacing is rather slack and the mystery is not as well thought-out as it should have been: the climactic big revelation especially is not handled well, relying on the considerable talents of the film's stars to get by (I must say, too, that hypnotism is definitely being over-used by Korean thrillers as a plot device). It should be said in the film's defense that, like Black House's gutsy Grand Guignol finale, the film does feature one act of revenge, which, like the more famous one in Old Boy, makes instinctive logical sense and is truly devastating in its supreme cruelty.

But all this would have been for naught had director Lee chosen the wrong actors. None of the leads are asked to do anything extraordinary but they inhabit their frankly two-dimensional roles with admirable professionalism and requisite conviction. In particular, few people will doubt Kim Myung-min's ability to carry a whole picture after Wide Awake: he does a superb job of conveying the self-doubt of a doctor whose faith in his medical skills is being eroded, and makes us believe in the soul-shattering agony of a decent Hippocratite who learned that his surgical prowess was deviously manipulated as a tool for evil.

Wide Awake is not as powerful as it could have been, (I kept thinking while watching it how a straightforward medical drama in the mold of White Tower could have been so superior to all this whodunit stuff) but it is certainly a step in the right direction, in that it doesn't pretend to be smarter or more important than it is. The film is definitely recommended to fans of White Tower, which probably would be its biggest constituency in East Asia, at least for the time being.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)