My Rosy Life

The final installment of the Korean Movie Classic Collection is 1994's My Rosy Life (or La Vie en Rose, 장미빛 인생), directed by Kim Hong-joon. It is set in Garabong, a suburb of Seoul, amid the student riots and general chaos of 1987 as the government prepared to host the 1988 Olympic Games. The story centers on a comic book shop which the proprietress (Choi Myeong-gil) uses as an illicit no-questions-asked shelter at night. Her shop is populated by a wide variety of down-and-outs, petty thieves, and others with no place to go who, for a small fee, can stretch out on the chairs, enjoy a bowl of noodles, and watch a late-night porno on the closed-circuit. In particular, three men are attracted to the shop and its "Madam:" Dong-pal (Choi Jae-sung), a small-time hood on the run from two or three different gangs; Yu-jin (Lee Ji-hyeong), a baby-faced writer whose latest work has made him an unwitting enemy of the state; and Ki-young (Cha Kwang-su), who harbors a secret that will upend all of their lives.

I really wanted to like this film. These are fairly well-thought-out characters thrown together at a very interesting place and time in modern Korean history. Unfortunately, there are just too many problems for the film to overcome.

The main problem is that the film revolves around the least interesting, most generic character, Dong-pal. Dong-pal is just a hood, like any other hood from any other Korean gangster film set in any time or place. Time spent with this character and his romance of the Madam (I'm not spoiling anything; that's Dong-pal and the Madam on the cover, shown above) is basically time wasted, when one considers the potentially much more interesting stories shunted aside to make room for him. In particular, the moment that Yu-jin reveals his secret, for all practical purposes his story ends, in favor of a "Yu-jin Becomes a Man" story which is utterly without interest.

A second problem, even more damning in my eyes, is that the first act of this central romance is Dong-pal's brutal rape of the Madam. I confess that I have very little tolerance for these "love-my-abuser" stories. At first, the Madam takes no action, the point being to demonstrate to us that she's a tough cookie; and anyway, she really can't turn him in to the police as she herself is running an illegal business. Besides, this is 1987 Seoul; you don't turn to the police for help, especially from their side of the tracks. Okay; fine. But Dong-pal immediately falls in love and (for lack of a better word) begins to stalk her, and this of course wears down her resistance over time. Spare me.

There are other issues, such as several laughably out-of-place martial arts fights (with sound effects straight out of the old Batman TV series; I kept expecting to see "OOF!" or "KA-WHAM!" spiral up from someone's kicked stomach), and the combined effect of them is to sink what had been a very promising premise.

Once again, we have an anamorphic 1.85:1 presentation that is crisp and clean, and a good 2.0 soundtrack in the original Korean. Subtitles are fine; much improved over the middle five titles from this boxset. Extras here include both a director's commentary track (unsubbed) and a 15-minute curiosity entitled "My Korean Cinema, Episode 8: Garabong, again." This 2006 item is nothing more than brief scenes from the film, in chronological order, presented wordlessly with a simple music track. Each brief scene is prefaced by a title card, on which the only things I could decipher were dates--evidently shooting dates, as each are from 1994. They're not outtakes or alternate scenes; each is from the film itself. I don't know how much sense it would make if one were to watch it without having seen the film; but maybe those title cards explain it all. There's also the usual trailer/poster/photo gallery.