![]() ![]() Filmed in glorious hand-held CinemaScope, the film demolishes the cinematicism of frames and compositions by becoming visually acute just as it is quietly harrowing when the camera never relinquishes its gaze from Shin-ae through times of happiness, guilt and remorse. She becomes the centre of the film's universe as well as ours. Instead it finds a delicate balance that saps the charged theatricality and subsequent banality from ordinary tragedies and its fallouts. With Jeon essaying one cyclonic upheaval after another, there's a tremulous sense of collapse that the film, to its credit, never approaches. As a character pulled apart by forces beyond her control, the sheer magnificence of this performance is central to the film's turbulent nature. ![]() Her performance as the widow Shin-ae remains an unrelenting enigma. Do-yeon Jeon's ("You Are My Sunshine") Best Actress accolade at Cannes in 2007 is well deserved. ![]() Understanding how personal revolutions are forged when views of our universe are changed, Lee not only sees the emotional cataclysm of a widow's sorrow through an inquiring scope but also feels the tumultuous existential currents that underpin the film when religion becomes a narrative scapegoat in comprehending the heinousness of the human experience. Adapted from a short story, Lee infuses the film with his sensitivity for the sublime paradoxes of life, last seen in his transgressively comic and irreverent "Oasis". Its bravura first hour is filled to the brim with subtextual insinuations, remarkable foreshadowing and adroit reversals of tone brought about by humanistic capriciousness. "Secret Sunshine" remains an immensely compelling, fluid work throughout its 142-minute runtime. Through its layered naturalism and stunningly trenchant view of small-town dynamics, Lee implicitly deconstructs the traditional Korean melodrama by pulling apart the cinematics of excess and ripping to shreds the arcs that shape its characters and grounds the proceedings into a crushing grind of stoic realism. It is an instantly sobering, brutally honest character piece on the reverberations of loss and a graceful memento mori that resonates with a striking density of thought, yet remains as inscrutable as the emotions it observes. ![]() Lee Chang-dong's exceptional "Secret Sunshine" is the single most emotionally ravaging experience of the year. ![]()
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