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I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Overrated and overhyped

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

A friend of mine who'd watched Milyang on my strong recommendation didn't look so satisfied. Feeling guilty of wasting her time, I took a little conversation with her and was somewhat surprised to find that she ended up being a little bit against the main female character, Shin-Ae.In the first scene, Shin-Ae's car has broken down on a highway near Milyang. Her phone call is connected to Jong-Chan, a car mechanic who has his own local shop. Jong-Chan's curiosity toward the good-looking woman tells us she lost her husband recently and decided to move to Milyang for good with her only son, Jun. If a handsome male single who meets a pretty widow shows excessive kindness from the very beginning, it's not difficult to imagine what he is thinking of her. "Because it is my husband's hometown," she answers to Jong-Chan's question why she chose Milyang. However, it is hard to tell whether she really meant the reason not only because she doesn't look for any links to her husband in town but also because nothing of Milyang seems to comfort her physically or mentally throughout the movie. "What kind of place is Milyang?" she asks to Jong-Chan looking out the car window. It was her first question in the car fixed and driven by Jong-Chan. Shin-Ae starts to think about Milyang seriously only after it appears in the eyes long after having decided to leave Seoul for good, and even after hours of long winding drives. Shin-Ae is, however, confident and spontaneous in starting a new life in a new place, but at the same time, she resists to be assimilated to her surroundings, not to mention Jong-Chan's consistent approach of affection. She is the mother of her son, Jun, anyway.Jong-Chan's kindness summons not just good wills around her. One twisted mind who runs a kindergarten where Jun is enrolled to kidnaps and kills him to make up money for his gambling debt. Shin-Ae collapses internally and externally. Her world has been lost. Now she desperately needs a real reason why, why she has to suffer so much, or the meaning of her pain. Spectators should not give much significance to the specific kind of religion, which is Christianity in the movie, or its ritual process. Anyone who's been in South Korea would know how common Christian churches are especially in urban areas. So, it is more appropriate that Shin-Ae needed a religious consolation, and it happened to be Christianity due to its wider availability in the culture.After a brief period of peace won from participating in religious process, waiting for her is one event. One day Jong-Chan drives Shin-Ae to the prison for her to meet and forgive the killer of her son despite all the discouraging of her religious fellows just because she was so determined to. She looks confident and spontaneous again before entering the interview room but comes out with unimaginable furious. All she says is a repetition of a simple sentence, "How God can forgive him even before I forgive him?" The killer told her that he also found God in jail and was forgiven by him.Now Shin-Ae seems to desperately try to follow just the opposite of the religious doctrine she learned. She seduces a married man to have sex and even cuts her in the wrist with a knife in a suicide attempt. In that way, she thinks she can win against God. Her world is so twisted that her life becomes a chess piece on the board overlooked by a tormenting super power. Meanwhile, Jong-Chan who lives a simple life never fails to show up for consistent affection for Shin-Ae and accepts even the most hysterical behavior of hers as it is without leaving her any moment. The movie ends when Shin-Ae is cutting her hair by herself in front of a mirror held by Jong-Chan, and the secret sunshine falls on a mingled trash in her yard.Milyang is definitely not a movie of vengeance or religious salvation. It is a story of our life where we tumble down and stand up as if on an endless loop. It doesn't matter whether Shin-Ae saw a possibility of new hope cutting her hair in the yard. I don't care whether Shin-Ae would marry Jong-Chan or not. I just respect both of her resilience and his consistency in life. Every shot and angle was carefully and beautifully created and woven together by Director Lee Chang-Dong. This is surely one of his masterpieces.

"Secret Sunshine" reminded me of "The Rapture" (1991), with Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, but this Korean production is a better film. It portrays super-religious Korean Christians in a provincial Korean city, and the main character's experiences interacting with them in the wake of a horrible personal tragedy. Shin-ae is a widowed single mother who moves to the city of Milyang ('Secret Sunshine' in Chinese) from Seoul with her young son. She has chosen Milyang because her late husband (killed in an auto accident) was born there, and she feels she needs to make a new start in life in a new place. She does not react well to the overtures of the local Christian zealots, one of whose members tries to convince her to come to their church and prayer meetings. Shin-ae is essentially irreligious and brushes these people off as politely as she can. In fact, she brushes just about everyone in Milyang off to begin with, but some of them are persistent in trying to invade her world, and the consequences are often hilarious. To say more would be to give the film away, but it should be noted that the performance of the woman in the lead role (Jeon Do-yeon) is stupendous. Having read that she won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 2007, I expected her to a decent job. But Ms. Jeon is captivating and it is impossible to take your eyes off her when she is on screen. The movie is a sort of harrowing Evelyn Waugh-esquire piece of work, showing how Fate can feel insane as much as strangely inevitable.

Corean cinema can be quite surprising for an occidental audience, because of the multiplicity of the tones and genres you can find in the same movie. In a Coreen drama such as this "Secret Sunshine", you'll also find some comical parts, thriller scenes and romantic times. "There's not only tragedy in life, there's also tragic-comedy" says at one point of the movie the character interpreted by Song Kang-ho, summing up the mixture of the picture. But don't get me wrong, this heterogeneity of the genres the movie deals with, adds veracity to the experience this rich movie offers to its spectators. That doesn't mean that it lacks unity : on the contrary, it's rare to see such a dense and profound portrait of a woman in pain.Shin-ae, who's in quest for a quiet life with her son in the native town of her late husband, really gives, by all the different faces of suffering she's going through, unity to this movie. It's realistic part is erased by the psychological descriptions of all the phases the poor mother is going through. Denial, lost, anger, faith, pert of reality : the movie fallows all the steps the character crosses, and looks like a psychological catalog of all the suffering phases a woman can experience.The only thing is to accept what may look like a conceptual experience (the woman wears the mask of tragedy, the man represents the comical interludes) and to let the artifices of the movie touch you. I must say that some parts of the movie really did move me (especialy in the beginning), particularly those concerning the unability of Chang Joan to truly help the one he loves, but also that the accumulation of suffering emotionally tired me towards the end. Nevertheless, some cinematographic ideas are really breathtaking and surprising (the scene where a body is discovered in a large shot is for instance amazing). This kind of scenes makes "Secret Sunshine" the melo equivalent of "The Host" for horror movies or "Memories of murder" for thrillers. These movies are indeed surprising, most original, aesthetically incredible, and manage to give another dimension to the genres they deal with. The only thing that "Secret Sunshine" forgets, as "The host" forgot to be scary, is to make its audience cry : bad point for a melodrama, but good point for a good film.

The most interesting thing about Miryang (Secret Sunshine) is the actors. Jeon Do-yeon, as Lee Shin-ae, the main character, is a woman with a young son whose husband has died in a tragic accident, and who leaves Seoul to live in Miryang, which was his home town, with her young son. Jeon's face is very changeable. She is girlish, flirtatious, elegant, aged and sad, desperate and joyous, with it and terribly isolated by turns, and it's all in her face. The film also stars Song Kang-ho as Kim, a man who meets her when her car breaks down coming into Miryang, who happens to run a garage in town, and who follows her around all the time thereafter, despite her apparent lack of interest in his attentions. Song is the biggest star in Korea right now, renowned for his work with Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance; Memories of Murder and The Host). And yet here he plays a throwaway character, almost a forgotten man. But of course he makes him interesting and curiously appealing. He is the essential ballast to keep Jeon's character from floating away.Lee Shin-ae is a piano teacher. She comes to the new town, which is a neutral place, a kind of poor-man's Seoul, a town "just like anywhere else," as Kim says (just as he is in a way just like anyone else). Her little boy is sprightly, as little boys are, but plainly damaged and withdrawn at times too. His father used to snore, and when he misses him he lies awake, pretending to snore. He goes to school, and Shin-ae meets parents and students and shopkeepers. There is a sense of place in the film, even though the place is in a sense "anywhere." People speak in the local dialect, and everyone knows everything, and Shin-ae's Seoul origin is immediately noticed. Is life really harsher here, away from the big city and its sophistication? Shin-ae seems not to realize the danger she is in.Something terrible happens. And Shin-ae doesn't necessarily deal with it in the best possible way. But it happens and she must face the consequences. But she can't. She goes to pieces. A perpetrator is caught, but that's no consolation. Eventually she becomes so despairing, she relents and goes to a born-again Christian meeting an acquaintance has been pressing her to attend. She finds peace and release with this. But when she decides not only to forgive the perpetrator but to go to the prison to tell him so, that experience is full of ironies and it destroys her all over again. She becomes embittered and desperate and she no longer finds solace in religion. And it gets worse than that.Jeon Do-yeon gives her all in this extremely demanding and protean role. Lee Chang-dong may be a very good director. If an actor of the stature of Song Kang-ho expresses enormous admiration for him, that is convincing. According to Scott Foundas of LA Weekly, Lee's first three films, Green Fish (1997), Peppermint Candy (2000) and Oasis (2002) have marked him out as "one of the leading figures of his country's recent cinematic renaissance." But this is not as successful a film as those of other Korean directors whose work I've seen, such as Yong Sang-Soo, Bong Joon-ho, and the prodigiously, almost perversely gifted Park Chan-wook. It may indeed begin as Foundas says as a kind of "Asiatic Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" and then "abruptly and without warning" turns into "something of a thriller, and some time after that a nearly Bressonian study in human suffering." But that progression not only seems random and indigestible; the film sags and loses its momentum toward the end and then simply fizzles out, with no sense of an ending. There are also weaknesses in the action. Shin-ae takes foolish chances with her son, and makes bad choices all along. If she is destined for madness like Betty in Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue, which might explain her peculiar and mistaken choices, that isn't something that is properly developed. This is an interesting film, certainly a disturbing one, but one that leaves one doubtful and dissatisfied, after putting one through an emotional wringer.An official selection of the New York Film Festival presented at Lincoln Center, 2007—an event that has done right by Korean filmmakers in the recent past.