RED VACANCE BLACK WEDDING (2011)

Genre: Drama
Director: Kim Tai-sik & Park Chul-soo
Cast: Ahn Ji-hye, Lee Jin-joo, Oh In-hye, Cho Seon-mook
Runtime: 1 hr 27 mins
Rating: R21 (Sexual Scenes and Nudity)
Released By: Shaw
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 27 December 2012

Synopsis:  The Red Vacance - 30-something Hee-rae is having an affair with Tae-mook. They decide to take a vacation abroad, but he never shows up at the airport. Tae-mook’s wife discovers their affair and takes him to Moojoo, a remote village, to keep him away from Hee-rae. Hee-rae, in turn, thinks that they’ve broken up but receives a text message, urging her to come to Moojoo, never suspecting anything devious.

The Black Wedding - He is on his way from his lover and favorite student's wedding, where he was the wedding officiant. He can only think about their days of living together. He goes back to the house where they used to live to reminisce, when there’s a knock at the door. She’s standing there, still in her wedding make-up, before going on her honeymoon. Could he let her go? .

Movie Review:

The poster would have you think that this is some Korean erotica like ‘Natalie 3D’, but this compilation of two shorts from Korean directors Kim Tai-sik and Park Cheol-su is anything but. At best, the two-part anthology revolves around the theme of adultery and therefore contain sexual elements, but if you’re here looking to get some ‘high’ from people making out, you’re likely to be sorely disappointed.

Instead, as the prologue explains, the movie was in fact an experimental work by Kim and Park, who thought that it might be interesting to each contribute a mini-feature length film using the basic premise of an older man falling for a younger woman and getting the same group of actors to star in both. Despite the similarities in subject matter, Kim and Park’s shorts are utterly different in tone and style, so much so that you’re better off considering them separately than as two halves of a whole.

In the same order in which the shorts are arranged, we’ll start with ‘Red Vacance’, which pits a vengeful wife, Bok-sun (Lee Jin-ju), against her philandering husband Tae-muk (Jo Seon-muk) as she kidnaps him on the very day he is supposed to go on a vacation with his mistress Hui-rae (An Ji-hye). Not only does he bring him to some secluded bungalow to exact her revenge, she also texts his mistress using her husband’s phone to meet him at that location. From chaining him like a dog to dousing him with gas to force-feeding him with Viagra so he would get ‘up’ for her, there’s little the broken-hearted and distraught Bok-sun wouldn’t do.

Stripped of excesses, Kim uses minimal dialogue, wide framing shots and some playful music to establish the offbeat comic tone. The result is definitely quirky but surprisingly engaging to watch, as if Kim were constantly toying with the expectations of his audience – and certainly he does with those expecting some manner of titillation, tantalising them with a five-minute long sequence of Tae-muk and Hui-rae having sex and then leaving them high and dry with just the occasional shot of Hui-rae’s braless breasts.

Park might be the veteran here, but we’re sad to say that we enjoyed his ‘Black Wedding’ short a lot less. Designed to be the very embodiment of irony, it has the middle-aged college professor Kim (played by Seon-muk again) officiating the wedding of his former student Su-ji (Oh In-hye) whom he is having an affair with. Kim retreats afterwards to their favourite hangout place ‘M Story’, and when Su-ji surprisingly arrives, we get flashbacks of their all-consuming passionate affair that we are made to believe is tearing both of them apart on the inside.

More like the soft-porn flick that the poster promises, this one contains slightly more titillating scenes of Kim and Su-ji making out. There’s no denying actress Oh In-Hye is sexy (if you don’t believe us, just Google her name and see the pictures of the dress she wore to the premiere of this film at Busan), but there are only two prolonged softcore sex scenes at the beginning and at the end – while the remainder of the movie remains largely a bore as the illicit romance between the pair proves shallow and unconvincing.

Not only is there little to make us believe that someone as beautiful and eligible as Su-ji would fall in love with Kim, it is also equally far-fetched that Su-ji would go ahead to marry someone she barely loves if she is indeed in love with Kim. The only interesting stylistic technique that Park uses in his film is the interchanging of colour and black-and-white scenes, with the latter being used especially in the parts where he tries to demonstrate how the characters are living in shades of grey.

Even by the end, ‘Black Wedding’ never fails to redeem itself as nothing more than a superficial take on love, sex and marriage. Like we mentioned earlier, ‘Red Vacance’ is the better short here, mixing dark humour with revenge drama to achieve an eccentrically appealing fairytale-like tone. We’re not so sure that Kim and Park’s genre experiment worked as a whole – certainly it won’t be the softcore erotica some are expecting – but we’re willing to recommend at least that you catch ‘Red Vacance’. It’s a different kind of Korean cinema, and the more likely among the two to take the industry in a bold new direction as this experiment had intended. 

Movie Rating:

(An uneven package of a quirky and original short mixed with a shallow and superficial one – i.e. ‘Red Vacance’ the former and ‘Black Wedding’ the latter)

Review by Gabriel Chong