In terms of realistic themes, South Korea has always occupied a high voice in the Asian film market, which can be seen in the Korean film "Parasite", which has aroused heated discussion some time ago.
Just when we thought that the South Korean people were very keen to make the whole country better through films that reflected the real problems of Korean society, the emergence of the movie "Kim Ji-young born in 1982" suddenly broke this peaceful scene.
On October 23, 2019, a film that reflected the difficult portrayal of Korean urban women in real life, "Kim Ji-young born in 1982", was released, and in less than two months, the film successfully set off an uproar in South Korea.
However, unlike "The Melting Pot", "Suyuan" and "Parasite", the Korean people's unanimous condemnation of the reaction events in the film until the excitement of the crowd is that the reputation and reviews of "Kim Ji-young born in 1982" showed a serious polarization after its release.
And this polarization is not because everyone has a great love bias for the artistic aesthetic of the film, but because the content reflected in the film makes Korean women feel empathy, but it has become a thorn in the heart of Korean men.
Therefore, in the South Korean movie rating website, male netizens gave "Kim Ji-young, born in 82" a very low score, while female audiences wanted to try to brush the score of the film to a burst.
So, what kind of story does "Jin Zhiying born in 82" tell?
At the beginning of the film, the heroine Jin Zhiying is busy doing housework at home, and it can be seen from the children's tent she is cleaning in her hand that Jin Zhiying is a mother.
As the plot of the film advances, Kim Ji-young's real situation is torn apart little by little by the camera, and she once worked as an editor in Korean planning is now a full-time mother who can safely raise children at home.
On the surface, the Zhiying life of picking up children to kindergarten on time every day, taking time to do housework, and occasionally drinking coffee while taking a cute baby to bask in the sun in the park is very comfortable, and even becomes the envy of many busy office workers.
But in fact, in the long period of time from giving birth to parenting at home, Zhiying's spirit has been very problematic, and this is likely to have a lot to do with postpartum depression.
Zhiying's husband Daxian is a good man in the eyes of others, commuting to work on time, loving his wife and daughter, and also taking care of his wife's inner feelings, being gentle and considerate.
But despite this, Zhiying was still sick. I don't know when, Zhiying will suddenly become another person, use that person's identity and tone to talk to the people around him, and every other day he will forget what he has done.
Seeing that his wife's mental condition had a big problem, Daxian came to the hospital to consult with the psychologist, but the reply was that he had to come to see the doctor in person to play a therapeutic role.
Daxian, who can't bear to tell his wife directly about his illness, has been trying to carefully care for his wife in his own way, hoping to make Zhiying's condition improve through his own efforts.
But unexpectedly, when returning to her in-laws' house in the New Year, due to heavy housework and the neglect of the mother-in-law's family, Zhiying fell ill on the spot, and this time the onset also laid hidden dangers for Zhiying's subsequent illness.
In the end, Zhiying's illness was known to her parents, and her panicked and distressed mother frantically accused her father of favoring sons over the years, and Zhiying had to give up the hard-won opportunity to work again after learning of her illness.
At the end of the film, the director did not tell everyone whether Zhiying's condition was completely cured, but in the end, it left everyone with a very happy ending, so that the audience saw that Zhiying's future has a glimmer of hope and expectation.
The whole film, from the story spread to the background soundtrack to the actor's performance method, adopts a very bland performance method to show the heroine Jin Jiying's daily life like boiling water.
Under this seemingly tepid or even slightly boring lens, it fiercely exposes the true portrayal of urban women in today's Korean society.
The workplace discrimination of urban women, the ubiquitous sexual harassment, the position of women who have been sacrificed and weakened in family relationships, and the parenting problems that accompany women for life, etc., have all been interpreted in this film to the extreme.
Under the seemingly bland plot, what is hidden is a turbulent undercurrent, and what is even more frightening is that in the name of love, this undercurrent derived from women's unfairness has always been deeply buried in the ground, from a hundred years ago to today's developed Korean society.
In the film, every time Jin Zhiying is ill, she will speak for the group she represents as a female identity, call on busy husbands to care more about their tired wives with the tone of their mother-in-law, tell their mother-in-law that they are also the beloved daughters in the eyes of their mothers, and use their grandmother's perspective to complain about their mothers who have worked all their lives.
No matter what kind of role, we can feel the indisputable fact that in Korean society, the status of women is indeed not high.
To date, South Korea remains the country with the largest income gap between men and women in OECO member countries, which means that in Korean society, whether before or after marriage, women's income levels are much lower than those of working men of the same age.
In "Jin Zhiying Born in 1982", the leader of the Jin Group, who has always been regarded as a workplace idol by Zhiying, quickly returned to the workplace after a month of production at the cost of sacrificing as a good mother, and struggled for many years to cling to his hard-won position, but in the end he was kicked out of the company and chose to start his own business.
Although The leader of the gold team knows how difficult it is for women to work, when the company set up a planning group with a long-term goal of five years, he still gave up the excellent performance of Jin Zhiying and chose a male colleague to enter the planning group.
And Zhiying, who was raising children at home after childbirth, had to give up her workplace ideals and plunge into the tedious parenting affairs, even if she learned that she was ill, her husband wanted to apply for parenting leave to take the child at home and let Zhiying work again, the mother-in-law would still immediately make a sharp phone call and scold Zhiying for ruining her son's future.
The film is based on the novel of the same name, Kim Ji-young, born in 1982, which caused an uproar in South Korea as soon as it was launched in 2017.
The novel was printed in less than 10,000 copies when it was first published, but eventually created a physical book sales score of 1 million copies, and the author of the novel, Zhao Nanzhu, was also named the "Writer of the Year" that year.
Unexpectedly, after two years, when the movie "Jin Zhiying Born in 82" was put on the big screen, it could still attract full of criticism and controversy, and the female protagonist Zheng Yumei was insulted by many male netizens on the Internet for no reason, and even reached the terrible level of personal threats.
After Bae Joo-hyun, a member of the Korean girl group, expressed his love for the original work on the Internet, he was also verbally attacked by the male fan group and blocked on the Internet.
Ironically, this is obviously a movie that even South Korean President Moon Jae-in strongly recommended after watching it, but in the eyes of many South Korean men, it is a work of feminism that reverses the right and wrong.
Although inequality between men and women is a very serious problem that still exists in many countries, unexpectedly, "Kim Ji-young in 82" made everyone understand that in the minds of many Korean men, it is still a matter of course for women to marry and teach their children at home.
We can be indignant about the violence suffered by deaf children, and we can fight for the right to reform the letter of the law for the humiliation and misfortune suffered by girls, but it is such a seemingly democratic and compassionate country that refuses to give even the slightest sympathy to its own women.
What's even more tragic is that this is not only happening in South Korea, but in Japan, in India, and even in China, we can see in our daily lives what happens to Kim Ji-young in the movies that still happen all the time.
"82 Years of Kim Ji-young" currently has a Douban score of 8.7 points, as a Korean drama film, "82 Years of Kim Ji-young" is not a 100% excellent masterpiece, but as a realistic film, the mission given by "82 Years of Kim Ji-young" is not yet completed.
If this were just the mundane story of a married woman in her thirties, we could have gotten a lot of gratitude from the film's final reunion ending.
But in real life, thousands of Jin Zhiying are waiting for a happy ending that can be as happy as in the film.
However, how long and how far will they have to wait?