※On Sunday morning, we introduce movies related to current events of the week. Movie content is included.
There is a movie that I often thought of while writing this column serially from May of last year. It is the 2010 film ‘The Housemaid’ directed by Im Sang-soo. When I was still a college student, I watched this movie with his family. The level of sexual scenes was higher than expected, so everyone was embarrassed to leave the theater, but to me, this movie remains an impression that has nothing to do with some lines or erotic scenes that have been used as jokes for a while. This is because of a short one-line line that appears only once in a 100-minute movie.
As everyone knows, this remake of director Kim Ki-young’s ‘The Housemaid’ (1960) flows without being too tied to the original. As the director puts it, the framework is the same, ‘a story in which a strange maid enters an elegantly prosperous family and establishes a relationship with the man of the house’, but the story the film wants to tell is focused on class rather than on the relationship between men and women. The goal is to show the hypocrisy and bewildered bare face of the upper class, while also conveying the fear of the ruling class, which nonetheless keeps its place as if it has not suffered a single scratch.
Now, as director Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Parasite’ (2019) is an outstanding work, many people understand without explanation what the story director Im Sang-soo wanted to tell through ‘The Maid’ and ‘The Taste of Money’ (2012) series. Even so, I am more emotionally attached to ‘The Maid’ than ‘Parasite’. Not because it’s a better, more realistic, or desirable story. Just as people who can’t say that in real life like the line ‘We don’t have money or Gao’, I like the line in this movie. “I’m going to have to make some noise!”
‘Eun-yi’ (Jeon Do-yeon), an idiot and idiotic woman, a fierce and kind maid, has a child with ‘Hun’ (Lee Jung-jae), the owner’s man. However, Eun-yi is eventually forced to have her pregnancy terminated due to the tip of the old maid Byeong-shik (Yoon Yeo-jeong)온라인바카라, who noticed this before her party did. Byung-shik, who is responsible for everything about her, goes to her hospital room with Eun-yi carrying enough money to give her a fresh start, and she is slapped. “Auntie, I will avenge myself.” Looking at her young woman’s face, her determined expression that might have been her own 30 years ago at one time, Byungsik says. “Yeah…the heart must be like a chimney.” What Eun-yi spit out in protest at her resignation, pretending to comfort her, to dream as much as she wants, is what was introduced just above.
This line that Jeon Do-yeon shouted with grim eyes remained in my mind longer than I thought. It may be the trauma suffered from the almost malevolent image that appears as a kind of shock therapy in the subsequent scenes. However, after becoming a reporter, whenever I came across an uninterrupted series of suicide cases, especially cases with adjectives such as ‘social murder’, I first thought that this might be someone’s ‘cheating’. While watching the recent death of a teacher in his 20s at Seoi Elementary School in Seoul, I thought of the movie again. Why does someone’s ‘cheep’ always have to be a life-and-death thing?
I desperately want a world where people don’t have to give up their lives to solve problems. In order to do that, the reflection and commitment as a reporter to listen to the voices that are not normally heard are so natural that there is no need to write a long one.I want to reduce the obvious words and appeal to members of society as fellow citizens. The struggle of the living is no lighter than that of the dead. I hope that the false idea that death is the only way to prove authenticity will not spread to those who have been put in captivity. So, rather than dismissing others’ appeals as ‘Who threatened me with a knife’, I hope to see it as my own matter to worry about together. Please, I just hope that the voices of the teachers at the field that the Ministry of Education and school administration, which grant infinite responsibility and do not give defense measures against malicious civil complaints, are a problem.