video.PhpMyanmar.com

A week passes in Seoul, with a diverse group of couples and singles experiencing love or tragedy in strong doses. Broken families and newly-formed marriages, struggles with debt or with an uneasy conscience, conflict and resolution, sickness and health, newly-discovered love, the resurfacing of old relationships... Similar to Robert Altman's Short Cuts or, more recently, Richard Curtis' Love Actually, sophomore director Min Kyu-dong (Memento Mori) utilizes a large cast of talented actors and a well-written screenplay to weave a multitude of stories into a single narrative.

Whereas sweet-tinged optimism tied together the multiple parts of Love Actually, director Min adopts a more somber tone in All For Love that is sympathetic to the struggles of its characters, but not necessarily convinced that everything will work out for them. Indeed, the film feels like it was made in a time of economic insecurity, with people feeling a bit uneasy about the future. Thanks in part to this, real drama develops towards the middle and later sections of the film, as we draw closer to the characters and become concerned for their welfare. The ending finally brings everything together in an ambitious crescendo, leaving the audience satisfied but also, perhaps, a bit exhausted.

The cast is almost uniformly good, so that each viewer may have a different favorite couple. Veteran actor Joo Hyun (A Family) and Oh Mi-hye (making her film debut) are a particular treat as a gruff theater owner and a woman who rents a coffee shop from him. Despite playing opposite multiple attractive young actresses, Ms. Oh is clearly the most beautiful woman in the film.

Uhm Jung-hwa (Princess Aurora) and Hwang Jeong-min (You Are My Sunshine) are a jolt of comic energy in their indignant bickering and awkward attempts to reconcile. Im Chang-jung (Sex is Zero) and Seo Young-hee (Jealousy is My Middle Name) provide some of the film's most dramatic moments as a newlywed couple crushed by debt and desperate for work. Yoon Jin-seo (Oldboy)'s role as a young woman about to be ordained as a nun may seem a bit far-fetched, but she acts with such charm that this is easy to overlook. Finally Cheon Ho-jin, a long-time supporting actor finally beginning to attract some notice, gives a rock-solid performance as a tightly-wound, divorced father struggling to raise his son.

It's true perhaps that All For Love (the Korean title, by the way, means "The Most Beautiful Week in My Life") fails to hit the brakes at some key moments. I would probably consider the TV basketball match re-enactment scene with Kim Soo-ro to be absolutely ludicrous, if I hadn't seen similar displays of emotional kitsch on Korean TV before. The When Harry Met Sally reference also felt awkward and forced. But on the whole, this film is a winner, for its narrative strength and its large cast of memorable characters.      (Darcy Paquet)

Retrieved from http://koreanfilm.org/