Showing posts with label a good rain knows. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a good rain knows. Show all posts

Monday, November 5, 2012

A Good Rain Knows (호우시절, Howoo shijeol) 2009


By Rex Baylon

What do you do when a filmmaker you respect and champion begins to make works that you dislike? Do you unabashedly support it and ignore the work’s inherent flaws? Do you ignore the work, pretend to suffer from cinephilic amnesia and hope that the offending film will fall through the cracks of time and be mercifully forgotten? Or do you finally sit down and deal with the fact that people, no less filmmakers, are imperfect artisans and that although our initial response to their work may have been unabashed excitement, it must be tempered and we must attempt to look at each new work free from the distractions of the past.

Having begun life as part of a three-part omnibus film entitled Chengdu, I Love You (2009) with contributions by Chinese filmmaker Cu Jian and Hong Kong auteur Fruit Chan. Hur Jin-ho’s A Good Rain Knows (2009) evolved out of that project and became its own feature. Being a Pan-Asian production Hur cast Korean superstar Jung Woo-sung, fresh off the production of Kim Jee-won’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008), to play the poet-turned-businessman Park Dong-ha and Mainland Chinese actress Gao Yuanyuan, who worked on the controversial Lu Chuan picture City of Life and Death (2009) that same year, was cast as May, Dong-ha’s melancholic love interest.