By: Trista

Trista — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:04:16 +0000

Wow C.M. Boyd, this is an interesting take on this film. I can definitely see some of your points – it wasn’t a standard documentary, but certainly she has her own feel. Your note that the camera work is fetishistic is actually my favorite part about this comment. I wouldn’t have come to that conclusion myself, but I can certainly see it. In the end I did enjoy it a great deal and it’s too bad that you didn’t – but these are certainly some very valid points and a genuinely awesome comment. Thanks for sharing!

By: C. M. Boyd

C. M. Boyd — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:45:13 +0000

I should have known right from the start that the filmmaker couldn’t deliver a meaningful film when she starts off with a narrated fable of her own. Why would a documentarian need to fabricate a fable about marriage? If you care a whit about the culture you are documenting wouldn’t you employ one from the culture you are observing? Far less artsy, I guess.
The severe camera “work” (entirely static) makes the film feel, at turns: staged, voyeuristic, superficial, calculating, and ultimately fetishistic. This filmmaker professes to examine old and new rituals, and she does, but by skimming along the surface and narrowly gazing at her subjects she holds them up as oddities and objects of ridicule. People in the theater laughed, but it just didn’t feel right to be laughing most of the time.
There is an utter lack of context and no understanding of the Korean culture displayed. The film is a disjointed and disengaged tourist’s travelogue at best. It’s highlight is a game of rock-paper-scissors between two girls at the wedding; the loser gets slapped in the face. The little girl wins and gently cuffs the bigger girl, then the bigger girl wins and smacks the little girl, making her head spin. Looking around at many of the Koreans in the audience after the film, it seemed like they had been smacked, not gently cuffed.

Comments on: Hot Docs 2009: Korean Wedding Chest

By: Trista

By: C. M. Boyd