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wish I could tell you I didn't know how
"Ardor", a South Korean movie about a wronged wife who herself enters
into an affair, would end, but unfortunately I can't. I had hoped that because
"Ardor" is a South Korean movie it would refrain from treading the
same trails numerous Bored Housewife Has Affair movies have already done
(most noticeably the recent Diane Lane movie "Unfaithful"),
but it doesn't.
Like "Unfaithful", "Ardor" benefits
greatly from an effective leading lady in Kim Yun-Jin ("Mr.
Iron Palm"), who plays Mi-heun, a devoted housewife and mother who as
the film opens is attacked in her own home by her husband's mistress. Suffering
more from mental than physical scars, Mi-heun
and her husband moves to the countryside, where Mi-heun enters into a passionate
love affair with In-kyu (Lee Jong-won), the village's carefree and very married doctor. Without knowing it, Mi-heun begins to lie to her husband,
wronging him the way he had wronged her.
There are a lot to like about "Ardor", most
notably the performances by its two leads. The actor playing the husband is also
very good. It's very obvious director Byeong Yeong-ju, a woman, knows the
inequity of being female in male-dominated South Korea. Mi-heun's affair is more
than just a means to sexual fulfillment, it's her way of giving the finger
to a society that looks the other way when her husband is cheating on her, but
would not provide her with the same nonchalance.
Still, "Ardor" is a relatively simple movie
without any twists or turns. There are no big surprises, and the characters are easy to read. I hesitate to say they're all one-dimensional, but
really, they are quite one-dimensional. It isn't the case that I would have preferred
some out-of-left-field twist, but I would have liked for the
movie to stray just a little bit from the usual path that most Bored
Housewife Has Affair movies seem to take. "Happy
End", for example, is completely unpredictable and a much more complex
movie. I would have liked some of that complexity in "Ardor".
What does make the film worth watching is the soulful
performance of Kim Yun-jin, who was last seen as a selfish woman in "Mr.
Iron Palm" and before that, as a North Korean assassin in "Shiri".
Kim has grown by leaps and bounds as an actor, and her Mi-heun effortlessly
shifts between a woman in a perpetual daze to one who has found renewed vigor in
her affair with In-kyu. As the heart and soul of the film, Kim does wonderful
work here.
As the other part of the affair, Lee Jong-won ("Mr.
Butterfly") is
appropriately shady, shadowy, and mysterious. For much of its first half the screenplay treats In-kyu as a
background character, someone who comes in and out of Mi-heun's life.
Eventually, though,
In-kyu does achieve some measure of resonance and becomes a large part of Mi-heun's return to
self-awareness; even so, he's still not important enough for us to know the name of his
wife. "Ardor" is very much Mi-heun's story from beginning to end, and
although In-kyu and the husband have key roles, they're not what drives the
movie, as, I believe, was the intention.
Like a lot of movies about housewives who strays into the
arms of another man, "Ardor" can't help but be sexual. When your
entire premise hangs on a woman who learns to enjoy the
fruits of sexuality, there's no getting around showing sex. It's just a question
of limits and how explicit things will get. Unlike "Intimacy",
which showed the explicit sex as a throwaway byproduct of an affair and of little
consequence, "Ardor" takes a more intimate approach. There's not the
explicitness of "Summer
Time", but "Ardor" is still very sensual.
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