The Multifaceted Transition of Lee Chang-dong
Lee Chang-dong was born in 1954. He came to film after a career as a fiction writer and teacher. As a fiction writer, he published two famous novels in the 1980s. Critics often refer to his film as “novelistic.” It is an easy way to understand his scope and reach. In addition, people often refer to his film as having an unexpectedly multifaceted character; on the other hand, his narrative construction is also elegant.
With this background in mind, another way to consider his relative transition is to consider Lee himself. While he was in his 40s and directing his first feature, Green Fish, he was grappling with fundamental questions of boundaries. People regard him as a director who is still searching for his medium. In his mind, he always asked what cinema was for. Therefore, Secret Sunshine became his phenomenal work, an idea about deep abstraction.
It is a study of how faith plays a role in its cruelty and strength. The film’s narrative depicts a human experience and a natural anomaly, explaining its existence not only through religion but also through science. It is an attempt to depict the invisible in mainstream visual media. In short, the film is smooth.
The Novelistic Detail of Secret Sunshine
Secret Sunshine’s novelistic attention to detail repeats experiences from sound to image to action. Besides varying on a larger scale, it marks rhythm as a descriptor. Subtly, it dramatizes the journey of the protagonist, Shin-ae, who is developing when she tries to come to terms with a kidnapping. Not only that, but she also tried to come to terms with the murder of her son. She tried to find a way to absorb and expel her grief.
In short, the film provides a much more open community and vision for the characters. It relies on conventional ideas about the turmoil beneath small-town life. As well as applies to film criticism that is more open to religion, its prevalence in contemporary South Korean society continues to increase. Shin-ae’s journey toward faith until she tries to come out again in defiance of God’s forgiveness does not fall back on the easy stereotypes of diverse people.
The rigidity of fundamentalism, as well as Shin-ae’s inability to win the hearts of others, stand in stark contrast to Jong’s figure. He is a mechanic who is infatuated with Shin-ae. On the other hand, he is like a stalker, a friend who doesn’t have a “pet.” His relationship with Shin-ae continues to be gentler but more boyish as well.
Confession of Faith
As a means of wooing or supporting Shin-ae, Jong mindlessly continued to attend church. Indeed, he continues to be present after he rejects the break in faith by embracing the sense of peace that he also imparted to Shin-ae. However, he is a figure with a much smaller purpose. Simply put, he’s trying to help explain Shin-ae’s traumatic experience. Of course, Secret Sunshine serves as a melodrama about the blurring of lines, salvation, coping, and the agony between insanity and belief.
The protagonist begins to face the first of the challenges to her way of seeing the world. After moving with her son to her late husband’s hometown of Miryang, she has also set up a piano school. She found herself the focus of local attention. Most of the other residents are unkind, apart from the big city smugglers, disapproving of the supervision and telling Shin-ae how the cure for all her ills is God’s grace.
Although confused, she continues to brush off the pharmacist, trying to be polite, all the while posing a challenge to herself. It could be; it becomes a puzzle that touches the core of the faith’s problem, not only the cinema’s problem. On the one hand, the desire or need to find meaning outside is only in the foreground.
The Spiritual Beliefs of Absence
The impossibility of certainty always appears in the absence of proof. In short, Secret Sunshine marks Shin-ae’s shaky first step in confronting a survival-centric past. The image of the sky from her son’s perspective starts to stare through the windshield of the car. When the rural space contrasts the scenery more carefully, objective and subjective will continue to be characteristic throughout the film.
It restores the image of the sky with the association of complexity to question the variety of repetitions. When the process is always busy Lee’s film, regardless of its duration of 142 minutes, looks scary for a film where people often perform it on an intimate scale. Because of its epic implications, audiences need it to the fullest. It presents an opportunity to investigate Shin-ae’s various stages of grief.
Regardless, her journey involves moments of self-pity, abandonment, and a brief retreat into the meaninglessness of the flesh. However, Lee continues to dominate the film as an experience of physical separation and an escape into spiritual rituals and beliefs. The film, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of morality and the painful human values of self. It goes beyond religious beliefs, which, in fact, people often generalize about.
Singularity of Morality
In one sense, the trip Shin-ae plans can be cruel. She surrendered herself to abstract wisdom that people may not know. However, she also found grace and peace in religion. When her belief and faith decide on forgiving her son’s killer, the scene where she visits him in prison becomes one of her most extraordinary experiences. In short, it denotes the supreme singularity of the individual.
As it always has, her indifference to any highest morality dominates her mind and psychology. Lee has won multiple awards at Venice for Oasis in 2002, in addition to the best screenplay award at Cannes for Poetry. It marked his status as one of South Korea’s most prominent filmmakers on the world stage. He has, however, been a key figure in the South Korean film revival for over a decade and a half.
Park Chan-wook got there because of Oldboy, and Bong Joon-ho got there because of Memories of Murder. Lee’s drama, on the other hand, is subtle but not for the masses. His style is modest, and his tendency to drop his trademark in his films makes it, objectively, very seductive to call him a down-to-earth director.
Underlying Korean Society
Most of Lee’s work involves photographing characters in detail, often unconsciously. It thrives on taking on a large scope and expressing the great power of Korean society and culture. In Secret Sunshine, Lee comments on how he wants to erase everything again in the film. Therefore, the audience will always focus on the mental experience of the central character in dealing with the death of her son.
While Shin-ae has a habit of looking up at the sky, as if searching for meaning and explanation, at the end of the film, the camera snaps a plain patch’s picture of land. Sunlight illuminates it. It’s no wonder that a rationalist ends her spiritual journey in such a way, spending most of the film suffering over invisible things and twists. The composition, but not the action, modulates a stage of grief acceptance.
Jong’s presence holding a mirror hints at the fragile bonds of friendship, but Shin-ae has been about them throughout the film. In the rest of the film, even in its final moments, it never suggests a catharsis. Conventionally, the final shot blows at Shin-ae, hinting at a disturbing fact from everyday experience. As in the film, it becomes a modern portrayal of an underlying decision or past.
Bibliography
- Chang-dong, L., & Fenkl, H. I. (2007). The Dreaming Beast. Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, 1(1), 317-337.
- Danks, A. (2012). Between Innocence and Experience: Lee Chang Dong’s Secret Sunshine. Senses of Cinema.
- Fenkl, H. I. (2007). On the Narratography of Lee Chang-dong: A Long Translator’s Note. Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, 1(1), 338-356.