Hello, Steemit community!
It's time to discuss one more Korean movie - "Crush and Blush" by Kyoung-mi Lee. I paid attention to it because the script was written by Park Chan-wook (the director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden). I respect his movies and will try to watch everything he is involved in.
It's hard for me to perceive Korean cinema because in their movies I see one thing and it's different on TV shows. Movies seem to have been filmed in the 70s, and TV series in the future.
"Crush and Blush" is not a right translation of the movie's title. It's better to call it "Miss Carrot" or "Miss Blush". This title gives the film a special meaning and explains a lot. There is a cult of beauty in Korea. A girl or a guy can do a plastic surgery at lunchtime. While we are eating salad with tuna, thousands of Koreans have moved closer to the ideal face. The standards of beauty played a cosmic trick on the main character - a school teacher Yang Mi-sook. She has skin problems: her face is red and windblown and her lips are chapped. She tries to make herself look good, but no one can help her. She does not brush her hair, she does not wash. People laugh even more at her because of it.
After a while, it turns out that this is not just a comedy about an ugly girl, but an extremely intriguing tragic comedy about a stalker.
If you watch the movie, you will be surprised at the quality of the picture. It is gloomy and gray of poor quality as if I'm watching a movie from the 70's. But this color completely conveys the mood and inner world of Yang Mi-sook. It seemed to me that in moments of happiness her hair was smooth and brushed, but this thought came to me after watching and I do not want to check it out. We see that the heroine's sweater gets light toward the end. Does it mean that she found her happiness? I firmly doubt.
There are a lot of jokes in Crush and Blush, in some places these jokes are very sad. The main character as stubborn as an ox, she is perfectly supplemented by a student with whom they make up an explosive couple. In addition to them, we have a frivolous beauty, a poor rag of a man all the fuss is about and his strict wife.
It's a good movie about the kind of people who can not find mutual understanding with the world around them, adjust to the common wave and be like everyone else. Someone writes that this is an Art house, but in fact, the film is very naturalistic like the rest of the Korean cinema.