Change Your Image
taipan_88
Reviews
Chang (1997)
Feminists in Korea have a long row to hoe.
Fate takes an orphan girl from the poverty of Korea in the seventies to a brief period of prosperity in the early nineties. Without a proper education, without a family and without honest friends Shin Eun-kyoung is treated like a servant and beaten like a dog.
Without a strong man to look after her, this hapless Korean woman is regarded as trash by mainstream Korean society and depressingly doomed to endlessly wander the city streets and country roads of Korea. Stopping here and there to earn a few crusts that are quickly snatched away by cruel men who consider themselves to be her overlords.
Just after this film was released Korea's economy entered a meltdown which has forced many women into a similar way of life that this film was foreshadowing as no longer necessary for young, educated Korean women.
In traditional Korea, it is women's duty to hold up the men to the sky. To succor them, to humor them, to provide them with the illusion that they are important.
A very sad tale of the relentlessness of fate for orphaned Korean women who fail to find a husband by the age of 25.