I really wanted to like this film, but I really really didn't. It showed great promise - a young French woman of Korean ancestry finds herself in Seoul and decides to try and find her birth parents - but never lived up to it or anywhere close. It could have been a great "finding one's identity" piece, but instead just had me gradually losing the will to live.
I have two main criticisms of this film. The first is that it was FAR too slow and WAAAAY too long. There is literally a sequence about five minutes long where all that is happening is the main character dancing, not spectacularly well and we only see her from the waist up. Absolutely no point, except to perhaps, yet again, show the difference between this lively and extroverted European-raised woman and her two more subdued Korean friends, who do not join her. When I finally escaped the cinema you could have told me the film was actually 5 hours long and I would have believed you.
My second complaint is that the main character, who is on screen for virtually every interminable minute, is thoroughly unlikable. No fault of the actress, who is very effective, but the material she is given to work with depicts a selfish, manipulative, cruel young woman who is mean to everyone who is unlucky enough to get close. There is no explanation for her meanness - by her own account her adoptive parents were good to her and we only see her adoptive mother briefly and yes she gets yelled at - so one can only presume that she is just plain vile. This makes her journey of self discovery even harder to sit through.
In truth the only thing I enjoyed about this film was the bag of Licorice Allsorts I snagged on my way in!
I have two main criticisms of this film. The first is that it was FAR too slow and WAAAAY too long. There is literally a sequence about five minutes long where all that is happening is the main character dancing, not spectacularly well and we only see her from the waist up. Absolutely no point, except to perhaps, yet again, show the difference between this lively and extroverted European-raised woman and her two more subdued Korean friends, who do not join her. When I finally escaped the cinema you could have told me the film was actually 5 hours long and I would have believed you.
My second complaint is that the main character, who is on screen for virtually every interminable minute, is thoroughly unlikable. No fault of the actress, who is very effective, but the material she is given to work with depicts a selfish, manipulative, cruel young woman who is mean to everyone who is unlucky enough to get close. There is no explanation for her meanness - by her own account her adoptive parents were good to her and we only see her adoptive mother briefly and yes she gets yelled at - so one can only presume that she is just plain vile. This makes her journey of self discovery even harder to sit through.
In truth the only thing I enjoyed about this film was the bag of Licorice Allsorts I snagged on my way in!