Source: International Herald Tribune
By Joan Dupont,Published: May 23, 2007
CANNES: It is difficult to picture Lee Chang Dong, the director of “Secret Sunshine,” going up the red carpet. Lee, who was minister of culture in Korea, is a shy person and surely the most discreet director at this festival.
His film, which is in competition, looks quiet too. “Secret Sunshine” opens on a fable: a gentle young widow, a piano teacher, goes to a small town with her child. It is her husband’s hometown, and the early signs are promising: people seem welcoming, the pharmacist smiles at her, and her small son adapts to his new school.
“I adapted the story from a novella,” the director said in an interview. “It was called the ‘Story of Insects,’ by Lee Chung Joon; I read it in the 1980s. It stayed with me.”
The director, 53, speaks in a whisper, which makes conversation tricky, especially at a lunch table – there’s no such thing as a quiet one at Cannes – and with an interpreter in the middle.
“The kernel of the story touched me. And I thought about it for a long time, before I even made films. Later, in between films, I thought about it again, and about the fate of the heroine.”
The woman’s child is kidnapped.
This is Lee’s fourth movie. A novelist and a professor who teaches film at the Korean National University of the Arts, he never thought he would become a filmmaker. But in the late 1980s, with video players in homes and the rise of what was called the New Wave, cinema became part of Korea’s changing society. Lee worked as an assistant on a film, “To the Starry Island” (1994) by Park Kwang-Su, a New Wave director.
Today, with only four films Lee stands out on the current scene, an intellectual who searches the hidden significance in ordinary lives. This is his originality, and what gives a sense of mystery to his films.
He is a director who switches genres: “Green Fish” (1997) was a gangster movie. “Peppermint Candy” (2000) has a story that goes backward, a time trip, partly inspired by Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal.” “Oasis” (2002), which he calls a kind of love story, won him the best director award in Venice.
In 2002, Lee was appointed minister of culture and tourism, which certainly got in the way of making movies. He resigned two years later and founded his own production house.
The movie was made on location in Miryang, a medium-size town far from Seoul, “an ordinary city, we just know that it’s a rough imitation of a big city,” the director said. The city, and the film’s Korean title, “Milyang,” where the action is set, means “a place with good sunshine,” he added. “But we have expanded it to make it secret sunshine.”
Lee shot in CinemaScope for the first time. “Most suspense movies aren’t made in CinemaScope,” he said, “but I thought it would be a good way to show the little things, the details in our daily life. I felt that CinemaScope could be a way of telling this story which is not just about what you see, but also touches on what is hidden. I tried to compose the scenes in such a way that you are not aware of the composition, only fluidity.”
We are not so much in a state of suspense, as stunned by each turn of the story. “I think that audiences today know everything, so my goal is to do something unpredictable, to show them something they don’t expect,” he added.
This is a movie that you can look at for the actors, but they are so good that they melt into the story. Jeon Do-Yeon stars as the frail heroine, and Song Kang-Ho, the popular lead of “The Host,” is her mysterious well-wisher. Both are stars in Korea.
Song, who made his film debut in Lee’s “Green Fish” as a gangster, uses his talent in a completely different way here. He behaves like a secondary character, a figure of fun because of his girth and clumsy ways.
“But if you watch closely, he is the focus of the film,” the director said. “And, in a way, the storyteller. His eye is always on her, but she keeps looking up at the sky. And when she walks, she can only go in one direction, straight ahead, she can’t look back. He has to follow her from a distance – if she looked behind her, she would see him.”
Romance is not on her mind, not when she first comes to town, and certainly not after the drama that befalls her.
“But my focus is not on the drama, but on what happens after,” Lee said. “All kidnapping cases have the same motivation and violence. It is the cruelest, most painful thing. I thought about making this film for a long time.”
There are evangelistic forces in Miryang and they get to work on the bereft woman. In no time, she is converted – but that is not the end of the story. In a densely written script, stories keep blossoming: some are unbearably sad, others funny.
“You see many crosses against the skyline of Korean cities,” the director said. “There are many religions and sects. My family has a Confucian tradition so I had no religion, but my wife’s family was Protestant, and I taught in a Protestant school.”
Lee says that things that happened in his own life made him feel close to this story. “The woman’s great despair touched me. She is in such pain, but in the end, she finds something inside herself.
“I think we keep living with faith because we need it. Even atheists believe in something – in something else. Yet, I didn’t want to make a movie about faith, really, but a reflection on what goes on inside us. Cinema is a great tool, a way to talk about the invisible through the visible.”
She also meets a car mechanic – a lumbering awkward man – who trails her, faithful-dog style.
But things are not as they seem and her life takes a tragic turn.
“Secret Sunshine” is mysterious and terrifying. At times, it feels like a thriller, with surprising twists, but it has a hidden core. It is a story of faith, how it can enter a life, and how it can vanish.
