A love not so ordinary

One of the specialties of Korean filmmakers is genre cinema, and one of their most liked genres (at least by mainstream audiences) is the romance film. Be it a rom com or a straight melodrama, Korean films have been tugging the heartstrings of people for quite a while.

The premise is so commonplace it's almost formulaic. Take rom-coms for example: A person who looks absolutely fantabulous (handsome or cute, depending on the situation,) who may or may not be sassy, befriends a person of the opposite gender in an incident that may be attributed to chance. The actor/actress portraying this character may have acted in numerous pretty boy roles, or in the case of a woman, may have a great number of cosmetic commercials. Slapstick may or may not ensue, which often involves the slapping of heads (we call this batok) and other inventive situations. After a long segue of fun interactions, which may consist of trips to some place of amusement, a freak melodramatic moment completely reverses the tone of the film at the last 2/3, which eventually resolves itself in a more or less happy ending thanks to a resolution. Oh, and 4 times out of 5, the two leads have known each other somewhere before, either as childhood friends or highschool classmates.

You've seen that, right?

What if someone screwed all of that up?

What if actor NOT known for playing pretty boy roles (Jeong Jae-yeong) is the male lead? What if the actress in the female lead, albeit pretty, looks like some normal person you can see in the street? (Although she still looks great in some shots.) What if the freak melodramatic moment happens in the first 10 or so minutes of the movie?

Director Jang Jin, who would later go on to have a hand in two of the biggest movies of 2005 (Welcome to Dongmakgol, which he wrote, and The Big Scene, which he directed) posed this question. The product is Someone Special (a.k.a. A Woman I Know,) a quirky, fun satire of the romantic comedies that have plagued Korea since the advent of My Sassy Girl.

Jeong Jae-yeong is Chi-sung, a down and out baseball player who has faced rejection one too many times. When he finds out he has lung cancer, he lives his life with abandon, since nothing really matters. He meets Yi-yeon, a slightly nervous, quirky bartender at a bar near his house. It's obvious that Yi-yeon is into him (she even carries him to a motel - stuffed into a box) but he doesn't care, since he's going to die. Eventually they get into various unconventional situations of their own, as Chi-sung tries to find out what love really is.

The film's parody of the Korean rom com genre is evident, especially in it's "Movie-within-a-movie" sequence, which I like to call "Telephone Pole," where Chi-sung frequently berates the movie, perhaps also due to his own disenchantment. Later on in the movie, when faced with a dramatic situation, Chi-sung does the same thing the guy in that movie did, hoping that somehow a miracle will happen, which is typical of many movies of this type. After a few moments however, it is apparent that nothing will happen... or are we led to think that way?

Ironically, although the movie deconstructs the genre, it also adheres to some of the elements it satirizes. The point of the movie is then made a bit more complicated by the notion that from a simple satire of the genre the movie makes itself an (albeit strange) example.

Jang Jin shows his talent for comedy here, using well-placed editing techniques and impeccable timing from the actors for comic effect. Speaking of the actors, the two leads are nothing if not unconventional, but they show an interaction and innate chemistry that enhances your perception of the film as a whole.

By the end of the film, we are left to ask for ourselves: what is love? The movie, through Chi-sung poses that question throughout the movie, but we can easily say that all of the opinions expressed in the movie are true. When you fall in love, it just happens. Love is... just love, is it not?