The Old Garden (2006) YIFY - Download Movie TORRENT

Im satirically (and brutally) depicted the 1979 assassination of South Korean ruler Park Chung-hee in his last film, The President's Big Bang. The Old Garden is another animal, soft, intimate, notable for its physicality and not without moments of poetry. The color is rich, and small details, hair, a touch, the munching of food, as well as the splash of water on a torso or a face, rain, snow, a policeman's club, are lovingly dwelt upon or intensely felt. This film is set only a little later in time but also in another more thoughtful style. It follows the outlines of a bestselling novel by Hwang Sok-yong, a story about the conflict between a memorable love affair and a life of devotion to leftist politics. It opens with the release of its hero, Oh Hyun-woo (Ji Jin-hee), who has spent seventeen years in prison for leftist activism and complicity in the student anti-government riots of May 1980 known at the Gwangju Massacre (they left several hundred dead). The 1979 coup led not to democracy, but military dictatorship. Public outcry against Gwangju was decisive in the run-up to democratic elections in South Korea that finally happened later in the Eighties. At Oh's release (which would be around 1997), times have certainly changed, though oddly enough, there is no reference to the new political situation. Clearly South Korea has had an economic boom and Oh's mother is now a wealthy realtor, who buys him 11,000 euros worth of new clothes without giving it a thought. His old political allies are either ineffectual idealists or hopeless pessimists who squabble among themselves at an evening gathering.Oh doesn't want to stay with his mother. He returns to the mountains where he was hiding out before arrest and revisits the home of art teacher Han Yoon-hee. She hid him for a while after the massacre and they had an intense affair. She is gone, dead of cancer ten years into his confinement without ever being able to see Oh again. He goes to her old place, where her paintings and writings are starting points for flashbacks to the earlier political events and to those days in hiding with Yun-hee. The editing is lovely here, moving from present to past seamlessly and neatly time after time and with a minimum of confusion.As we watch Hyun-woo's troubled idyll with Yoon-hee, we know what's going to happen -- he's going to get caught -- and we wonder how. This is the portrait of a relentlessly dedicated crusader. His political duties are more important to him than his love. Though Yoon-hee begs him to go with her deep into the mountains to hide -- she will quit her art teaching job for that -- he decides to go back to Seoul, and he's quickly captured there.Yoon-hee is pregnant with his child. It's a girl, Eon-gyul.The second half of the film focuses more on Yun-hee's life during Hyun-woo's time in prison and on the horrible time of the massacre. Yun-hee doesn't raise Eon-gyul, and the little girl is sometimes alienated from her mother. Yun-hee remains faithful to Oh, and when a cute younger leftist comes on strong to her, she sends him packing.The accusation that this film will be incomprehensible to us because it's a little vague about the historical events is hard to credit. We know very well what's going on. If anything is off-putting, it's some odd eating habits, not the politics. The emotional side, anyway, is very understandable. Hyun-woo's behavior is a little hard to sympathize with, but that's because he is who he is: someone who remains a hero by in some ways failing as a human being. But he's never made predictable. And where before we wondered how he would get caught, now we wonder how the story will end.When he finally talks to Eon-gyul on the phone and then meets her on a busy glitzy street in Seoul (and she's a sexy babe now) Hyun-woo doesn't admit he's her father, but she knows. Haven't we seen that somewhere before? The ending, with this scene followed by a sentimental, sugary song, is cheesy, with the shadow of Yun-hee lingering none too subtly in the background (the couple's palpable longing for each other has been handled beautifully up to here). Yun-hee's paintings, ultra-realistic sentimentalized and aged "photographs" of the family and personalities, are also a bit cheesy. They may have worked better in the novel where you don't actually have to see them.Still, the beauty of early scenes, the understated depiction of the intense love affair, the seamless but clear and logical ways the film shifts time-frames, leave good memories that the somewhat rudderless second half can't erase. As a whole, The Old Garden reads as a passionate meditation on how lives can seem in memory and in reality to revolve around a few key moments. Im has almost made us forget about the "long littleness of life," made us believe in the grandeur of a historical narrative where each scene seems a beautifully crafted piece in a chronological puzzle held together by fact and emotion. As Yoon-hee, Yum Jung-ah is intense without ever being weepy or melodramatic. Ji Jin-hee, as Oh Hyun-woo, is a sexy hunk with acres of charm. He has a smugness that is unappealing, but that just may be exactly right for his character. You almost wish she had lived instead of him. What is to become of him now? Will he get rich like his mother, or continue to be a crusader for workers rights? The film, Im's fifth, is currently playing in Paris, where its complex melding of love and politics has been critically well received, according to Allociné. Whether Americans are as responsive to such a story, with its intense historical-personal mix, is another question. Part of the SFIFF 2007.

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by purpleracer-61226 9 / 10

First time watching Korean movies

I found this movie to be really good but it was kind of slow in some parts fast and others and I'm still not up to date on Korean history back then I'm just learning and sometimes I learned just by watching some of the historical movies like this one but I love the actors and actresses because I've seen them in other things so this is really good for me as an American to learn about Asian culture I could read books which I love reading books but watching movies helps me guide so this is a guide for me I found a lot of the reviews really long on this but that's because they have a better understanding than I do I still liked it I gave it a nine star because some of the slow parts that was the only reason.

Reviewed by Chris Knipp 8 / 10

The Old Garden

2006 [KOREAN]

Drama / History / Romance

The Old Garden

2006 [KOREAN]

Drama / History / Romance

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Movie Reviews

First time watching Korean movies

Historical meditation on the conflict of love and politics

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