Last Updated on September 28, 2020 by rob
An innocent country girl Sae-jin (Jeong Yu-mi), travels to Seoul to begin her first job. When the company she’s joined quickly goes bust she finds herself reduced to a crappy basement flat in a shabby neigbourhood with a lowly gangster, Dong-chul (Park Joong Hoon) for a neighbour. Before long the pair strike up an unlikely friendship and as Dong-chul’s bulldog tenacity helps Sae-jin survive a series of cruelly humiliating job interviews her striving to improve her status awakens in the street thug the possibility that there just might be something more to life than being a punchbag for his scheming boss. But with a corrupt and vicious ex-cop who has Dong-chul in his sights and the latter increasingly estranged from his own gang is it already too late for him?
This is a splendid ‘opposites attract’ drama-comedy, well observed (not least the soul crushing nature of the job hunt and interview process), beautifully played by the two principals, full of sentiment without being sentimental and often laugh-out-loud funny (the scene where Sae-jin takes Dong-chul home to see her Dad and tutors him on what to say only for Dong-chul to get all his lines mixed up is an absolute scream). But can a girl and a gangster really get together? The film never lets us forget that Dong-chul is a violent man who may just be capable of murder. But because we really care for both of these characters and sense that beneath Dong-chul’s tough facade there’s basically a good hearted kid who never got the right breaks, we’re on the edge of our seats waiting to see how writer-director Kim can resolve the plot while still giving us the emotionally fulfilling conclusion we want.
Kim’s film is really impressive here in the way it so skilfully avoids falling apart in the third act (so often the bane of these kinds of movies) whilst still remaining faithful to the lives of its very different characters. Suffice to say that after what seems like a brutal downer of a climax the final scene is guaranteed to leave you with a huge – and I mean HUGE – smile on your face. Why is it, I wonder, that modern American cinema has almost completely lost the ability to make modestly budgeted, character-driven gems like this? Thank heavens then that someone can.
