On the surface, the South Korean movie Ardor is a movie about a bored housewife having a passionate affair, in revenge for her husband's unfaithfulness, featuring sensual love scenes. But, in the background, director Byun Young-joo tries to tell a woman's story about gaining power, about her ego and about her desire. The film has a feminist message.
Housewife Mi-heun thinks her life is pure happiness, with a loving husband and a beautiful daughter, until one Christmas Eve she finds her husband's mistress in her bed. The illusion of a perfect life is shattered.
To help mend their marriage, Mi-heun and her husband move to the countryside, where she meets In-gyu, a charming doctor who plays around with women. In-gyu proposes a game of love to Mi-heun and a passionate affair begins between them. The rule of the game is that as long as one of them doesn't say "I love you," the affair may continue. Mi-heun decides to create a series of lies for her husband, in the same way her husband used to lie to her.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HWA JAAN FILMS
Actors Kim Yoon-jin and Lee Jong-won both give convincing performances. Kim, in particular, renders a depth of acting, shifting from a pure and vulnerable wife to a woman of secrets, also gaining vigor in life from the dangerous extra-marital relationship. Kim was the North Korean assassin in action thriller Shiri (1999); and the selfish woman in Mr. Iron Palm (2002).
But it is Ardor that sees her give her most polished performance. By getting the most out of his leading actress, director Byun makes this movie a film by a woman for women.
It is not a sugar-coated tale, telling you to expect Mr. Right, but the voicing of a woman's desire and independence in a gender-unequal society such as South Korea. With this movie as her first dramatic film, Byun (who was a prolific documentary maker prior to the film) also shows a sophisticated depiction of women's psychology in her detailed narratives.
The only pitfall of the movie is that the development of the story is a little predictable. For those who are used to a Hollywood style-housewife-having-an-affair movie, one might be disappointed to find no surprises toward the end of the movie.
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
RSS