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Hanna is a good-natured, hard working woman who has been blessed with a knockout voice. Thanks to this, she is hired to perform as a "ghost singer" for a sexy, hot-tempered young pop star named Ammy. As Ammy struts about the stage, lip-synching amidst her crowd of backup singers and dancers, Hanna is backstage in front of the microphone. No one takes seriously the prospect of Hanna becoming a pop star on her own, because at 169cm and 95kg, she's about as far from the thin/pretty prototype as you can get. But she seems happy enough pouring her heart into song each night, and staying as close as she can to Ammy's good-looking young music producer Sang-joong, who seems to genuinely enjoy her company.

Alas, this happy equilibrium cannot last, and one day Hanna finds herself utterly humiliated and robbed of any will to go on. Rather than kill herself, she drops out of society and embarks on a course of radical plastic surgery and weight loss. Her surgeon is talented, the pounds come flying off, and a few months later Hanna is not only unrecognizable, she is a stunning beauty. And with a voice to match (but a secret to hide), she is a prospective diva with no need to lip-synch.

For me this is not the sort of synopsis that inspires great confidence, and the first 20 minutes of the film seemed only to confirm my worst fears. The fetching young actress Kim A-jung (When Romance Meets Destiny) who portrays Hanna is decked out in a latex fat suit which I suppose is more or less convincing, except for the fact that her face muscles don't move when she speaks. The narrative initally bumps along powered by fat jokes that are offensive and not particularly funny (nobody else in the theater was laughing, either).

Gradually, however, the film starts to produce some well-deserved laughs, and by the time Kim A-jung is allowed to shed her latex, we end up with a fairly entertaining comedy. The film has various little strengths I can point to, such as a surprisingly good performance by Joo Jin-mo (Happy End, Musa -- I don't think he's ever been as charismatic as he is here), a bouncy soundtrack, a few good supporting characters, and an amusing behind-the-scenes look at the Korean music industry.

But Kim A-jung is the reason to watch this film. I have to say it, Kim A-jung is the bomb. Not only does she look great, but she does all of the singing on her own and she displays a nice instinct for comedy. When Hanna transforms herself, she becomes beautiful but doesn't really "act" beautiful, having grown up as someone almost universally looked down on. Kim manages to capture this element of the role nicely, even when it gets rather heavy-handed towards the film's end. When this film was in the casting stage, quite a few established actresses turned down the role, including Ha Ji-won, Kim Ha-neul, Kim Hee-sun and Ko So-young. It's hard to imagine the movie doing nearly as well if any of these other women had been cast.

The second film by director Kim Yong-hwa (after Oh! Brothers, which I am not a particular fan of), 200 Pounds Beauty is originally based on a Japanese manga by Suzuki Yumiko, although -- like Park Chan-wook's Oldboy -- the final screenplay has ended up differing quite a bit from the source material. It's tempting to try to tease some sort of social insight out of the film, given the rage for plastic surgery among young Koreans (for men as much as women). I'm not sure the film really supports this, however -- ultimately it's just an entertaining comedy with nothing particularly new to say. Nonetheless, Korean audiences were certainly charmed, as they bought a stunning 6.5 million tickets,for a box office take of about $45 million. It may be "hard to be a beauty" (the original Korean title of this film), but it certainly doesn't hurt ticket sales.      (Darcy Paquet)

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