Sayang Wayang: I Wish I Had A Wife (2001) @ 나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다

Saturday 24 December 2011

I Wish I Had A Wife (2001) @ 나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다

At a glance:

Park Heung-sik's I Wish I Had A Wife 나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다 is the worst Korean movie experience a man can get. Forget the wife, you’d sooner wish you had a life – instead of havin to spend time and money watchin this. While its advantages are few and far between, the problems abound shamelessly. Revolvin around a bank teller with serious personality issues, our man goes on a subdued panic attack after he realises the undeniable emptiness in his borin white-collar workin life gives him nobody to call when he is stuck on a subway train for an hour. Amazin then – he concludes that he needs a wife. Our hero-with-a-calculator Bong-soo (Sul Kyoung-gu) goes on a 100-minute meanderin moan about his solitude. His ponderings are so secular, self-indulgent and ridiculous that it becomes shockin to see somethin so uninterestin go up on screen for a feature-length movie. True to Korean cinema clichés (read: everythin is more important than it really is), there are hardly any movie messages to note when Mr. Need-A-Wife hunts his bride far and wide, illogically ignorin the cute school teacher who fancies him. This mouse of a woman, Won-Ju (Jeon Do-yeon), is so terribly cute, one is in danger of bleedin pumpkin pies from one’s ears whenever she graces the screen.

Bad news on the doorstep:
Peppered with Bong-soo’s random magic tricks (he can poke an invisible hole through a 1000-won note!) and other miscellaneous fillers like CCTV footage of what bored people do at the ATM booth, I Wish I Had A Wife has but one savin grace as defence - the awkward courtship between the lead pair is quirky enough to be screen-worthy at times because it is more realistic than the picture-perfect Hollywood plot devices we are used to. Is this enough for you to watch it?

Perennial wonderment:

One suspects that this is actually an ill-advised direct and unaltered adaptation from some writer’s own experience. This movie is too quiet without being poignant, too random without bein artsy, and perhaps too ‘real’ to make a movie out of. Even if you pardon the soppy music score, askin an audience to sit through a low-key drama about one man’s wife-hunt with so little reward is truly selfish on the filmmakers’ part.