Lee
Jung-Jae - Sung-Hyon
Jeon Ji-Hyun - Un Ju
Price: P100.00
Subtitle: ENGLISH
CDs: 2
Synopsis and spoiler:
The story begins with a girl, Un-Ju, moving out of a house by the sea named Il
Mare. Un-Ju leaves a letter in a mailbox asking the future tenant to forward all
her letters. Little does she know that the mailbox is actually some kind of
portal machine that connects two different time lines. Un-Ju lives in the year
of 1999. On the other end of the portal, in the year 1997, lived Sung-Hyon who
was the architect of Il Mare. He was also the one who named the house Il Mare.
By fate, these two strangers happen to share a dog named Cola. It is most likely
the same dog.
At first, they both don’t believe that they actually live in different years. Un-Ju starts to point out things that happened in certain days in 1997. She also gets Sung-Hyon to return her portable recorder that she accidentally lost in the train station back in 1997. She tells Sung-Hyon the exact time and place that she left it, and Sung-Hyon retrieves it for her by leaving it in the mailbox.
Over time, the present day Sung-Hyon starts to fall in love with the future Un-Ju, but to Sung-Hyon's frustration, even though they have been writing letter to each other a while, back in 1997, Un-ju still didn’t recognise him and continued her relationship with her boyfriend. Sung-Hyon doesn’t dare to disturb her, because he understands that Un-Ju loves her boyfriend so much. In his depression, Sung-Hyon gets drunk and tells his frustration to the future Un-Ju who is still waiting for her boyfriend to finish his studies abroad to return to Korea. Later on, she finds out that her boyfriend has returned from overseas but is now engaged to someone else. She is devastated.
At one stage, Un-Ju and Sung-Hyon promise to meet each other on a future date, but Sung-Hyon never shows up. When Un-Ju asks him why he didn’t shows up, Sung-Hyon is confused too because he is very sure that he won’t forget such a promise. In one of her correspondences, Un-Ju tells Sung-Hyon where she will be having her last date with her boyfriend before he leaves to study abroad.
In the mean time, Un-Ju is trying to find out in the present time where Sung-Hyon is, so she goes to the university where Sung-Hyon is studying architecture. There, she finds out that Sung-Hyon is killed in an accident right in front of her eyes. Flashback in 1997, when she was having her date, she saw an accident happening in front of the restaurant that she went.
The present day Un-Ju remembers that accident on that day, so she rushes back to Il Mare to warn Sung-Hyon about the accident. However, in Sung-Hyon's timeline, he is already on his way to the restaurant when Un-Ju puts the letter in. It seems to me that Un-Ju is trying to change the timeline and prevent the accident.
The ending is a bit confusing to me. It seems that in Un-Ju's timeline, Sung-Hyon still dies. But in Sung-Hyuo's timeline, he did get the warning in time, and he finally meets Un-Ju in his future. The ending scene is similar to the opening scene, except for the scene where Sung-Hyon is introducing himself to Un-Ju.
Acting:
I gauge good acting by the amount of emotion that results from watching the story unfold. If one plays the devil, it is by how much I really hate the character, but if one plays a good person, it is by how much I feel for their characters. So here are my thoughts on the main lead characters:
Jeon Ji-Hyun: I saw her first in My Sassy Girl, and I think she really suited the role. Personally because of her character there, I rather disliked her. In Il Mare, however, she has a totally different character, and I think she played it nicely. She portrayed Un-Ju’s disappointment over her boyfriend very strongly while portraying her enjoying her correspondences with Sung-Hyun very well.
Lee Jung-Jae: This is the first time I saw his movie, and I can say that he’s not too bad at all. When he was upset seeing Un-Ju with her current boyfriend, he could really show his disappointment, but at the same time display an emotion that he understands how much Un-Ju loves her boyfriend.
Story:
In my opinion, this movie is really touching. Not much conversation in some episodes, but you can see and understand the story line. I always like this kind of movies. The acting and the cinematography are very well done and really capture the essence of the movie.
I find that the concept of someone being your soul mate but is unreachable to you is quite acceptable. Your perceived soul mates are unreachable because they may already have met their spouses, they are from a different age group, or they are from a different life. In this movie, it was time that separated them.
I suppose the questions that were asked by Prince Henry in “Ever After: A Cinderella Story” was quite valid to consider. He asked, “And what happens if the person you're supposed to be with never appears, or she does, and you're too distracted to notice?”.
Technical aspect:
As I’ve said before, the cinematography was very artistic and well done. The idea of a house in the middle of nowhere has always appealed to me. It was actually located by the seashore where the high tide covers the whole ground underneath the house, but in low tide, the ground becomes a yard where Sung-Hyon can play soccer.
Overall opinion:
I dislike sad endings in movies. Fortunately, this movie is somewhere in the middle. From Un-Ju’s timeline, it’s a sad ending, but from Sung-Hyon’s it’s totally the opposite. This type of movie has a similar concept to Kate and Leopold, Frequency and Sliding Doors, and is actually quite ingenious.
If you like watching science fiction stories, you’ll probably like this movie. It kind of tickles your mind and makes you wonder how real the concept of time portal that connects two different time lines actually is; whether it’s possible for our ‘past’ to become ‘current’ in someone else’s lifetime; whether it’s feasible that our ‘current’ is someone else’s ‘future’. This movie really brought those aspects out, and I totally enjoyed it, although it took me several days to really understand why the ending became like that. Like I said, I always appreciate a less chatty movie that still clearly tells the story.
