Corean cinema can be quite surprising for an occidental audience, because of the multiplicity of the tones and genres you can find in the same movie. In a Coreen drama such as this "Secret Sunshine", you'll also find some comical parts, thriller scenes and romantic times. "There's not only tragedy in life, there's also tragic-comedy" says at one point of the movie the character interpreted by Song Kang-ho, summing up the mixture of the picture. But don't get me wrong, this heterogeneity of the genres the movie deals with, adds veracity to the experience this rich movie offers to its spectators. That doesn't mean that it lacks unity : on the contrary, it's rare to see such a dense and profound portrait of a woman in pain.
Shin-ae, who's in quest for a quiet life with her son in the native town of her late husband, really gives, by all the different faces of suffering she's going through, unity to this movie. It's realistic part is erased by the psychological descriptions of all the phases the poor mother is going through. Denial, lost, anger, faith, pert of reality : the movie fallows all the steps the character crosses, and looks like a psychological catalog of all the suffering phases a woman can experience.
The only thing is to accept what may look like a conceptual experience (the woman wears the mask of tragedy, the man represents the comical interludes) and to let the artifices of the movie touch you. I must say that some parts of the movie really did move me (especialy in the beginning), particularly those concerning the unability of Chang Joan to truly help the one he loves, but also that the accumulation of suffering emotionally tired me towards the end. Nevertheless, some cinematographic ideas are really breathtaking and surprising (the scene where a body is discovered in a large shot is for instance amazing). This kind of scenes makes "Secret Sunshine" the melo equivalent of "The Host" for horror movies or "Memories of murder" for thrillers. These movies are indeed surprising, most original, aesthetically incredible, and manage to give another dimension to the genres they deal with. The only thing that "Secret Sunshine" forgets, as "The host" forgot to be scary, is to make its audience cry : bad point for a melodrama, but good point for a good film.
