Happy End

Min-ki has lost his job. He stays home, cooks, and looks after the baby. His wife Bo-ra runs an English school, she is the one earning, and she is still seeing a man from before. Min-ki finds out and says nothing. Jung Ji-woo writes and directs, in his first feature. Choi Min-sik plays Min-ki and Jeon Do-yeon plays Bo-ra. The question underneath is economic. It was made in 1999, two years after the Asian financial crisis hit Korea. Mass redundancies put men at home and the distribution of roles inside the family changed fast; the film takes that change as its direct subject. Min-ki's anger comes not from being deceived but from losing his position. What was discussed most on release was the explicitness of the sex, and the film became part of a censorship argument in Korea. What stands out now is not that but the coldness of the ending. Neither Choi Min-sik nor Jeon Do-yeon was internationally known at the time. Both became among the most important actors in Korean cinema afterwards. Who it is for: viewers who like late nineties Korean cinema and hard family drama. Who it is not for: the violence and the sex are explicit, the film defends nobody, and the final section is disturbingly calm.