SYNOPSICS
Jang-rye-shik-eui-mem-beo (2008) is a Korean movie. Seung-bin Baek has directed this movie. Song Ha-Yoon,Seon-ae Ji,Lee Joo-seung,Jeong-min Kang are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2008. Jang-rye-shik-eui-mem-beo (2008) is considered one of the best Drama,Mystery movie in India and around the world.
The suicide of a bright schoolboy, 17-year-old Hee-Joon, stirs extreme responses from those left behind. This clever, intriguing feature keeps us guessing about the truth behind the flashbacks. It includes a young girl transfixed by taxidermy, a predatory sports teacher who bonds rather too closely with his male students, and a literature teacher with a violent response to poor writing. Then there are members of a family and the leading characters in Hee-Joon's novel. The result is an emotional puzzle with a dark sense of fun. A wayward South Korean gem - at once funny, macabre, and mysterious.
Jang-rye-shik-eui-mem-beo (2008) Reviews
Complex
I can't tell you exactly why, but I really liked this movie. It's pretty complex, it's story lines interfere with one another, there are many things left in the open (or so I think) and the only thing I can say for sure, is that I didn't understand everything shown in the movie. It builds up from the beginning and many things get revealed much later (like the relationships between persons, story lines etc.). The performances are great and the characters are all fully explored (even if their intentions/motives might seem weird). (South) Korean movies in general are sometimes a bit weird or seem so, when watched by western audiences, but this one is weird for anyone ... and I just like it for being as it is.
Interesting film about relationships in a dysfunctional family of self-absorbed, alienated people
This interesting film probes the relationships within a dysfunctional family whose members have been brought together, as if for the first time, by the funeral of a teenage boy not related to any of them. The plot explores the psychological histories of the husband (a medical professional in denial about his homosexuality), his estranged wife (a teacher with frustrated ambitions of being a writer) and their remote daughter Ami (a schoolgirl with a fixation bordering on necrophilia), and their separate and parallel relationships with the boy, Noh Heejun, a fatherless youngster with a flair for writing and a liking for 19th century English Romantic literature. Through Heejun, the three family members find some fulfillment of their desires, to the extent that they try to control him in ways they have learnt from their birth families and early experiences. With his death, they find themselves flung together unexpectedly and (spoiler alert) discover that the novel he has been writing about a creepy gay man, a teacher and girl is about them! The characters are not attractive people – teacher Mum is a particularly nasty piece of work (but she's unconsciously emulating her misogynist grandfather literature professor after all) and the daughter's facial expressions go from one kind of blank to the next kind of blank and the next – and only Heejun might encourage any sympathy at all from the audience as he goes from one family member to the next. The under-acting is deliberate so as to draw viewers' attention to the characters' isolation from one another with only Heejun uniting them all. The notion that people in a family can be so self-absorbed and estranged from one anther that none of them knows what the others get up to and can't recognise themselves or their relatives in a schoolboy's novel makes for a very dark comedy rich in its observation of alienated individuals and their secret hopes, desires, thwarted ambitions, friendships gone forever and lost opportunities. The film is low on tension and its pace can be slow. It's more quietly gruesome than horrific. How the plot resolves itself in its weaving, side-stepping way, and what the family members will do when confronted with the truth about their secrets, is the thing that has to sustain viewers' attention to the end; some viewers might find the jumping around from one character's viewpoint to another's a bit tiresome and pretentious. Personally I had no problem, perhaps because knowing the characters' back-stories and how these fed into their obsessions and attempts to manipulate Heejun for their own gain was in itself intriguing. From a technical point of view, the film can be annoying with parts filmed with a hand-held camera; close-ups of actors' faces while conversation is going on are often jerky when they should be still. This jerkiness might be intended to add some tension to particular scenes, especially those scenes in which the teacher is criticising Heejun and his writing. The jerkiness seems to emphasise the woman's enjoyment of unnecessarily tearing strips off the boy. I found this a likable film in spite of the often unpleasant issues touched on. "Members of the Funeral" features some excellent acting performances and first-time director Baek shows some flair for unusual narrative and inventive story-telling, if he can only keep the camera steady!