Ardor (2002) is the first feature film by Byun Young-Joo, whose name is synonymous with feminist documentary filmmaking in Korea. Her documentary trilogy about “comfort women” – military sexual slaves forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army during the 1930s and 1940s – changed the conversation about military sexual slavery both inside and outside of the country by putting faces and names on anonymous victims of sexual violence from Korea’s colonial past. These documentaries also transformed the former comfort women into survivors, activists, and fighters for justice who still live through physical, psychological, emotional traumas in their sixties and seventies. After these internationally acclaimed documentaries, Byun now takes on the institution of marriage in Ardor and the film makes the bold statement that marriage violates basic human rights – to love and to be loved without confining moral codes and behavioral boundaries.
Based on a popular novel by a female author, Ardor (2002) focuses on a woman’s life after a traumatic experience that has left both physical and psychological wounds. Ardor’s protagonist is Lee Mi-Heun (Kim Yun-Jin), a college educated, married woman in her early thirties. She is a homemaker and a devoted wife and mother who lives in Seoul, Korea. Her family photo will be emblematic of an urban, middle-class, nuclear family, which contemporary Korean society constructs as a norm. However, Mi-Heun’s marriage is revealed to be nothing but a façade when her husband’s mistress pays a visit to their house and knocks Mi-Heun unconscious in a fit of passion and rage. The sanctity of her home is broken let alone her heart. Six months later, Mi-Heun and her husband are still together, but she still suffers from excruciating headaches that no painkiller or tranquilizer can quell completely. Her husband decides to relocate the family to the countryside in the hopes that the change in climate will aid her recovery.
Soon after moving to the countryside, Mi-Heun meets In-Kyu, a young, handsome doctor who proposes a new treatment for her psychosomatic headaches, which no other doctor has previously prescribed – a no strings attached sexual relationship with him for four months. However, the proposal for what In-Kyu calls a “game” has one rule. The game is over when one of the players says, “I love you.” Mi-Heun decides to enter into this unusual relationship in which a confession of love results in a break-up of a relationship.
Byun Young-Joo carefully stages the first sex scene between Mi-Heun and In-Kyu in an effort to convey Mi-Heun’s slowly awakening body and mind. Byun’s camera captures subtle movements of Mi-Heun’s muscles to focus on how her physical awakening leads to the awakening of her consciousness without objectifying her body but rather rendering her as a subject of this process. After the sex, Mi-Heun playfully asks In-Kyu if she was any good. In-Kyu replies he felt as if his whole body was being sucked into her. This is the exact same expression that Mi-Heun heard her husband’s mistress use when describing their illicit affair six months ago. Upon realizing the sexual power of female, Mi-Heun experiences something of a rebirth. Mi-Heun’s headaches disappear and her awakening is represented through the use of mise-en-scène. Her neutral-colored clothes give way to bright, colorful dresses (red, in particular), and her posture conveys a shift from a lifeless, depressed state to one in which she stands upright with her head raised, looking at the world with a new-found passion.
Unfortunately, however, Mi-Heun and In-Kyu’s game comes to an end as they fall in love and begin to take their relationship too seriously. Moreover, rumors about them spread widely in the town and Mi-Heun’s husband eventually finds out about his wife’s infidelity. Vilified and isolated, Mi-Heun and In-Kyu leave town in the hope of starting a new life together, but their escape is short-lived. The two lovers are involved in a car accident as they leave town and In-Kyu is killed.
Ardor is book-ended by Mi-Heun’s confession-like voice-over narration. The film begins with her introducing herself (“My name is Lee Mi-Heun”) and concludes with her describing just how much her life has changed. Mi-Heun now works a day-to-day job, lives alone in a one-room house, and cries every night. Yet, she proclaims that she is more alive presently than she ever was in the past. This confessional form of dialogue is mirrored by another female character in the film. A battered wife confesses to Mi-Heun that her husband was the first customer she slept with working as a barmaid. Before leaving the village in order to hide from her husband, she says to Mi-Heun, “my name is Eun-Yeon.” This confessional mode of address not only echoes a number of testimonies by former comfort women who came out and spoke about their experiences regardless of their personal shame, but it also functions to build a sense of alliance between these two female characters in the film: a middle-class, educated woman, Mi-Heun and a working-class former sexual worker, Eun-Yeon.
Mi-Heun also forms a rather strange alliance with another female character in the film. Despite the fact that they have never met, Mi-Heun is drawn to a woman whom she only sees in a photograph. After her car breaks down in the middle of the road, Mi-Heun enters a nearby abandoned house to seek help. Inside, Mi-Heun finds an old, broken picture frame lying on the floor. The frame contains a family photo of a husband and wife: the man is smiling and looking at the camera while the woman’s gaze is directed somewhere outside the frame. Later, Mi-Heun’s neighbor tells her about a violent incident that took place inside the now-empty house when the wife killed her father-in-law after he discovered that she was having an affair.
In-Kyu once tells Mi-Heun that he hates marriage because of its insurance-like quality. If marriage is a contractual arrangement between two individuals, the family photo serves as proof of that contract. The picture frame of the family photo, then, represents the institution of marriage, or the moral codes that define acceptable and unacceptable behaviors and confine human desires within a conventional form of marriage. Looking away, the woman’s gaze in the old, broken picture frame evades the camera and thus symbolizes her act of challenging or defying the moral codes and “rules” of marriage. In contrast, Mi-Heun smiles widely and looks directly at the camera when she has her “family” photo taken in the film’s final scene. In a typical family photo, the wife sits on a chair with her children and the husband stands behind them. Mi-Heun sits alone and the shot’s asymmetrical composition reinforces this absence. While she does shed tears, one gets the sense that her emotions result less from a yearning for her family, and more from her memories of In-Kyu. Mi-Heun wipes her tears and smiles for the camera. She looks younger, livelier, and more beautiful than ever before in the film. Unlike Eun-Yeon who is on the run away from her violent husband and the woman in the picture frame who is in prison for murder, Mi-Heun breaks away from the restraining boundaries of conventional marriage, or more correctly, her broken marriage. She has a room of her own, however shabby and small that room is.
Ardor received the Best Film and Best Actress awards at the seventh “Women Audience Awards” in 2002 in Korea. Based on popular votes by female moviegoers, this film was chosen as the best Korean film of the year and Kim Yun-Jin (familiar to American Audiences for her role in ABC’s Lost) was recognized as the best actress. However, Byun Young-Joo’s Ardor has not been without controversy – some critics and audiences champion it as a feminist text while others criticize it as a disappointing representation of female empowerment. I view Ardor as one of the most subversive feminist films that contemporary mainstream Korean cinema has ever produced; a film in which the director skillfully transforms potentially clichéd subject matter into such unconventional narrative and visual styles.
JaeYoon Park © 2009
