200 Pounds Beauty

Hanna has a beautiful voice but cannot go on stage; she sings from behind a curtain while another woman performs out front. The reason is plain: Hanna is fat. After a night of humiliation she disappears, and a year later comes back as an entirely different woman under the name Jenny. This time the stage is hers, but nobody looks at her under her own name any more. The film uses cosmetic surgery as material for commercial comedy and then, by the end, turns against it. Its best move is that the more Hanna wins the lonelier she gets: she cannot see her father, she loses her friend, and she can tell nobody who she is. Kim Yong-hwa wrote and directed. Kim Ah-joong plays Hanna and Ju Jin-mo plays the producer Sang-jun. The source is Yumiko Suzuki's Japanese comic Kanna-san Daiseiko Desu! Made for four million dollars, it drew over six million six hundred thousand admissions in South Korea and was the third most watched domestic film of 2006. Kim Ah-joong won best actress at the 2007 Grand Bell Awards. Who it is for: anyone who likes Korean romantic comedy and musical crowd-pleasers. Who it is not for: anyone wary of the subject. The film swings between offering surgery as a solution and criticising it, the jokes about weight are harsh, and the closing message contradicts its own story.