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Tale of Two Sisters
(2003)
Dir: Ji-woon Kim
Nothing like an inventive, modest little foreign picture to glorify what a lazy bunch of fucktards run Hollywood. Much like Ringu and Ju-Yon:The Grudge were in Japan, Tale of two Sisters was wildly successful in it’s native South Korea. So naturally, as was the case with Ringu and Ju-Yon, those tinsel-town adding machines--with however faint a collective heartbeat--are in the pre-production phases of stamping out an American remake.
Whether or not it will be a shot-for-shot repackaging of the Asian version, pairing the original director with a washed-up television actress, remains to be seen. It is quite likely, however, that the story will need some dramatic tweaking to appeal to the I Know What You Did Last Summer set.
In Two Sisters, two sisters return home after a visit to a mental hospital to find that things are not quite as they left them. Their father and step-mother are acting very bizarre, and at night there are strange noises and snowstorm television screens. Loosely-wrapped, fish guts in the refrigerator await the inquisitive, standoffish Su-mi (Su-jeong Lim), and an unseen ghost plagues her timid younger sister, Su-yeon (Geun-yeong Mun). Things are definitely spooky, but moreover they are confusing. Su-mi is torn in all different directions by her hatred of her step-mother, her dissatisfaction with her father, a longing for her dead mother, terrible dreams and a menstruating ghost. Meanwhile Su-yeon is a frail mess. Su-mi head-butts her aggravations, but little sis mostly just cries and screams, prompting some passionately protective behavior from Su-mi.
Rather than settling into any tangible resolution, as the film progresses, things pinwheel out of control. A grimy female ghost is revealed, hiding under the kitchen sink, that conceivably serves no purpose other than being, well, a grimy female ghost hiding under the kitchen sink. In what seems to be some sort of flashback, the step-mother drags a giant, bloody gunnysack through the house, pausing occasionally to beat it with an iron rod. There is also a menacing closet that serves as an incubator of terror. What the film ultimately feels like is a bunch loosely related vignettes about this family, tossed into a blender. It’s supposed to be based on a Korean folk tale, but it feels as though it’s a hodgepodge of a couple of them.
What works, works exceedingly well--the cinematography and direction are both superb. What doesn’t work rarely overshadowed this, because the film seems by-and-large content to exist as a bumbling huddle of dramatically poignant slices. This loose poetry will undoubtedly be regarded as a plague in the American remake. Everything will need to become crystal clear, and thusly, another fine foreign film will be crudely smelted into insipid, blingy bullion.
You’d think it would be more fiscally reasonable to just dub the original movie in English, rather than desecrate its lovingly cultivated ambiguity with a nauseatingly plausible ending, and ruin the focused weirdness of the picture with slavish Hollywood predictability. But hey, piping mindless shit down the boundless maw of the masses is the American way!
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