Saving My Hubby
(dir.Nam-seob Hyeon)
This was the first movie from my Korean collection that I had seen before that I pulled out and watched all the way through again. Kind of odd since I wouldn’t have ranked it as one of my favourites. I guess I decided to watch it again after seeing Take Care Of My Cat and Ring Virus. I wanted to see if it was the same actress playing the level-headed, oppressive-family afflicted character in TCOMC and the evil psychic girl in Korea’s version of The Ring playing the overly anxious, harried lead in Saving My Hubby. Indeed, it turned out to be one and the same, Du-Na Bae. She’s all of an entire year older than when she acted in TCOMC but looking a little more weathered. It’s fitting though considering that she’s playing the part of a young new mother, Geum-sun, trying to cope with raising a child, learning how to be a wife and homemaker, and giving up on her dreams of being a star volleyball player.
That’s just her character profile. The movie then takes Geum-Sun and sets her on her way in a mad dash around the seedier slums and nightclubs of Seoul as she searches for her husband, Jun-Tae (played by Tae-Woo Kim from The Contact) who is being held hostage by oafish swindlers. In the process, she has run ins with two mob groups, fights off a letch, avoids a mysterious menacing stranger, beats up her husband’s superior, and has to negotiate her way through the denizens and cast offs in the urban slums. All the while, she’s toting around her baby girl (whom everyone mistakes as a boy to Geum-Sun’s dismay) papoose style on her back. AND…this is all a race against the clock as she tries to find her husband and get back home in time to meet her stern in-laws who are coming in on the morning train. Oh yeah, she also needs to find a couple of mackerels. The North American movie it reminded me the most of was After Hours with Griffin Dunne as the lost innocent wandering the city streets at night bouncing from one oddball situation and characters to the next.
This is your basic “pile on” movie: set up a simple scenario, wife tries to find husband, and then pile on as many obstacles and problems as possible. The keys are to avoid making the absurd situations ridiculous and to have a convincing performance from your lead who has to keep it together in the acting department. An over the top performance would send the movie into farce and that’s not the type of comedy it’s attempting to be. It’s trying to build sympathy for the put upon, Geum-Sun, as she, in one night, has to transform from an unprepared and directionless young mother, to an independent, fast thinking and mature individual in light of the comical and stressful situations around her. Du-Na Bae engages this role successfully. Her performance in the earlier part of the movie is properly whiny and spoilt. As she’s put through her paces through the middle parts of the film, narrowly avoiding all the dangers coming at her, the determination in her becomes more and more evident. So by the end, as she eventually reaches her boiling point and breaks down crying, the audience is sufficiently prepared to sympathize with her.
One thing about the ending: while the final scene is appropriate and clearly discernible as a “happy ending”, it felt to me like a sequence was missing between the final scene and the one preceding it. Geum-sun’s maturation as a mother and a wife was never really acknowledged by anyone, even by herself, even though that seemed to be the idea of the movie. The story pays due diligence to resolving part of her problem as she gets to live out her dream again. But running around the city all night should have also taught her about the responsibility and appreciation of having a family, not only about how to spike a volleyball.
Rating: B
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