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COURTESY OF HIFF
"A Good Lawyer's Wife" has been called the Korean version of "American Beauty."
Twists keep movie afloat
A handsome attorney finds success and personal fulfillment in the courtroom but falls short with his wife and family. A young boy wrestles with the stigma of being an adopted child. A dying man looks back at the events of his youth. The attorney's wife discovers that she is being scrutinized from afar by a voyeuristic teenager.
These are four of the several subplots that South Korean writer/director Im Sang-soo draws together in "A Good Lawyer's Wife." This tale of love, sex and deception is not as surreal as "Blue Velvet" or "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," nor is it as explicit as other art-house dramas as "Prospero's Books" or "In the Realm of the Senses." Still, Sang-soo's examinations of an unsatisfying marriage is not for the prudish -- nudity and sexual content are essential ingredients in this interesting tale.
'A Good Lawyer's Wife'
Not RatedPlaying 12:45 p.m. tomorrow and 8:45 p.m. Wednesday
Dole Cannery multiplex theaters 8 and 9
Even though an American audience will likely miss many of the film's subtle references to recent Korean history, two points emerge early in the story that any viewer should recognize: Successful attorney Joo Young-jak seems to serve as a little more than a sexual prop for his promiscuous girlfriend, and his wife finds his participation in her sex life unsatisfactory. (She even tells him that she seems to have lost her G-spot.)
Young-jak isn't the type of guy who likes to discuss his feelings. If he is discomforted by the nature of his sexual relations with his wife and mistress, it isn't apparent. His mother, however, does get to him when she discusses her own sexual experiences and compares his father's performance with that of another man.
But why is the attorney cheating on his wife at all? That's never clarified in the film. Never mind that actress Moon So-ri looks like a dream wife in the role of Joo Ho-jung. The director never shows us any reason why Young-jak would want to have a mistress. (The English title is apparently not even close to being a translation of the original Korean title, "Baramnan Gajok," but allows non-Korean speaking audiences to appreciate the various ways in which the word "good" can be used in reference to the changing dynamics of the marriage. He is a good lawyer and she is a good wife -- at least until she puts two and two together.)
And, as the wife's young admirer becomes more prominent in the story, the director also avoids clarifying whether the teenager is a voyeur, a stalker, a curiosity-seeker or someone sincerely seeking a long-term relationship with her.
In short, there are sufficient twists and turns in the story to keep "A Good Lawyer's Wife" from ever becoming predictable or boring, even without being able to appreciate the subtleties of the story and the Korean cultural milieu.
Moon So-ri gradually eclipses Hwang Jung-min as the lead actor in the film, just as the focus of the story gradually shifts from the multifarious matters burdening the attorney to the single issue that concerns his so-called "good" wife.
Billed as "a provocatively erotic portrait of infidelity" by the festival organizers, "A Good Lawyer's Wife" is solid adult fare.
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