Daddy Long Legs
Director: Kong Jeong-sik
Year: 2006
Rating: 5.0
Country: Korea
It is Ha Ji-won day or as her closest friends
call her Empress Ki (TV series). My favorite Korean actress but even that
didn't save this film. It has the pulse of a coma patient on tranquillizers.
Too bad because this had all the markings of a solid Korean romantic comedy
but then they left the comedy out and gave the romance a slug in the mouth.
Ha Ji-won throws everything she has at the screen; the hidden smile, the
glistening tears, the vulnerable stare like she is an endangered species
but the writers let her down with a script that felt like various leftovers
mixed in a pot and hoping no one would notice. In the final twenty-minutes
they give the film a twist that is supposed to bring out the Kleenex but
just left me befuddled.
In an animated prologue we meet Young-mi
as a small child and her loving parents - and then kills them off - you kill
them off in the animation? That seems cruel. She grows up and thankfully
turns into Ha Ji-won. Some unknown benefactor pays for her college and she
calls him Daddy Long Legs after the novel by Jean Webster - that the Astaire-Hepburn
film is based on. Young-mi is quite literary and later says she has read
the New York Trilogy by Paul Austen and her friend says me too. What the
hell. I am from New York and not read it. Is he so popular in Korea? And
she likes the music of JD Souther. People still listen to JD Souther? Well,
they should if they don't. She gets a job in Seoul as a writer for a radio
show. The kind that asks the audience, what kind of love do you have or what
was the first thing you loved about the person you are with.
The company put her up in this lovely home
because the female owner is on the radio staff but on sick leave. And she
begins receiving e-mails from this owner that were written a year ago to
be sent a year later. And she tells her story of love, obsession and unrequited
love. And losing her memory slowly. Young-mi and her friend (Yi Shin) try
and track whoever the man must be to tell him of this woman who loves him.
She also uses the e-mails to tell a story on the radio. And she falls in
love with a librarian played with torpid dullness by Yeon Jeong-hun. And
I didn't really care about any of these threads. If you go an inch deep it
is basically the story of a stalker - Daddy Long Legs and the unrequited
love as the owner follows him even to join the company she is in - and he
never notices her. But then the weird twist comes and you just think, what
the hell was that. I am still not really sure.
