The most painful life and the most helpless despair are also the most able to motivate people to draw the power of rebirth from a life of mediocrity.
As the master of Korean poetic directors, director Lee Cangdong's works usually show the contradictions and symbiotic relationship between man and society from the perspective of emotional restraint and calmness, and "Miyang", as the fourth work of his director, still continues this just right emotional output from an emotional point of view, but its discussion of social issues has risen from "people to people" and "people and society" to the relationship between "people and religion" presented in "Miyang".
The film tells the story of Li Shen'ai, a single mother, who left Seoul with her son to return to her husband's hometown of Miyang after her husband died in a car accident. However, when his small town life is gradually on the right track, he encounters the desperate encounter of his son being kidnapped and extorted, and after hard work, he is still brutally killed.
The great pain caused Li Shen'ai to gradually begin to believe in God with the help of the pastor's neighbors, but life was still constantly testing and destroying the seemingly gradually repaired life and mind.
When he first arrived in Miyang and had not yet entered Miyang, Li Shen'ai's car broke down, which became the first part of the film, and it was this anchor break that made Li Shen'ai know Zong Can, who came to help.
Faced with her late husband's hometown and the place where she was about to live, Li Shen'ai showed a sense of distance and alienation from Miyang far greater than her curiosity about a strange city, and this was also revealed in her communication with Zong Can.
From Seoul to Miyang, the gap in living environment made Li Shen'ai have a certain rejection and misunderstanding of such a border town in Miyang, when he asked Zong Can: What kind of city is Miyang? Zong Can just smiled and replied, "It's no different from other cities, fast, just like his words." ”
In fact, the story and theme told in "Miyang" are destined to be tragic, Li Shen'ai took the child back to her late husband's hometown to live, from the perspective of the incident itself, Li Shen'ai was only immersed in the pain of losing her husband, and hoped to return to the place where her husband lived to find spiritual sustenance for comfort.
From Seoul to Miyang, whether it is from living habits or urban style, there is a great difference, Zong Can, who runs a grocery store, and Li Shen Ai, who learned piano from childhood, there is an insurmountable gap in thought and temperament, and Li Shen'ai's initial sense of superiority and alienation is also doomed to a certain extent to be unable to integrate well into the life of Miyang, and this self-sustaining purity and vanity have also contributed to the tragedy of his son's abduction to a large extent.
After learning that his son has been killed, the director who habitually hides his emotions and restraint still follows the biggest characteristics of this type of work, and when Shin Ae goes to the river to claim Joon-er, the camera of the picture only advances far and slowly, and does not show the place and atmosphere of Joon-er's murder, so as to avoid making the film fall into the traditional Korean film's fanfare cliché.
The same treatment method also appears in the cremation scene of Jun'er's body, aiming at the emotional presentation of relatives, the film does not use the traditional sensational background music plus the large close-up of the sad expression of the relatives' faces, but through the reflection on the wall of the crematorium, the figure of the relatives is blurred, and when expressing emotions, it can also present a kind of freehand charm outside of jumping and emotion.
From these two points of view, the director's emotional presentation for "Miyang" is more like a third party that exists independently outside the event, or a bystander who maintains a clear thinking, in addition to the calm and restrained emotions, the audience has more time and space to think about the human relationship outside the event, and also makes the film's context and emotional communication more clear.
The religious issues that the author focuses on in the film have also become an important part of promoting the development of the film's plot.
The pharmacy couple who are neighbors are a Christian couple, and before their son is kidnapped, the pharmacy hostess tries to persuade Shen Ai to join Christianity, explaining that every ray of sunshine you see is what God wants you to see, and that each ray of sunshine has its own meaning, while Shen Ai only firmly tells herself to be an atheist.
This plot is followed by a shot of Shen Ai returning home to find his son and the son hiding, such a plot setting can be understood to a large extent as the director's arrangement for the subsequent plot development of the film, and many searches are for the plot of the kidnapping of his son caused by Shen Ai's publicity.
It can be said that from beginning to end, Shen Ai is a woman who is not very able to accept reality, whether it is in the reality of accepting her husband's car accident cheating, or facing the fact that her son was killed, Shen Ai is actually taking an escapist mood to face life under the seemingly strong outside.
This is like the secret yang in Shen Ai's mouth: "The meaning of the secret yang, the secret secret, the sunshine of the yang secret sunshine." "There's always a lot of sunshine in the pharmacy women's population that has tended to be milder lately. It is precisely out of the escape from reality that the emergence of Christianity has filled the gap in the psychology of devotion in time, but the original harm that reaches the depths cannot be covered by the "grace of God".
Even if you believe in God, when you learn that the murderer of your son has been forgiven by God in advance before he can get his own forgiveness, all faith-based dependencies collapse, and the pain of losing a son is repeatedly superimposed with the feeling of betrayal of being deceived and ignored, becoming an insoluble magic obstacle in Shen Ai's love. As a result, Shen Ai's series of extreme actions after that were like the song sang: All this is fake....
The religious issues and even the authenticity of human nature involved in "Miyang" are actually a reflection on religion and belief in popular culture and commercial films, and the meaning of the film is not out of criticism of religion or human nature, but tries to explore with the audience how the other in distress should coordinate with themselves and even use external forces to achieve self-salvation.
Because real life has no imaginary beauty, and has never been able to give a dramatic turn like a movie, so the individual's uneasiness can only seek rebirth in the continuous run-in and compromise, so this is undoubtedly not a certain degree of realism, but a living reality.