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My favorite movie of 2001 was Im Kwon-taek's Chunhyang. A beautiful story of devoted love between a young prince and a courtesan's daughter, it bowled me over with its gorgeous imagery, glorious tale, and its use of pansori, an ancient, operatic storytelling tradition. So when Im's next film, Chi-Hwa-Seon, won a major prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, I put it on my list of most-eagerly-anticipated movies. Chi-Hwa-Seon has finally made its way to Chicago, and though it's certainly a fine film, it's not worth the wait.

The movie is a bio-pic of one of Korea's most famous painters: Jang Seung-ub, better known as Oh-won. Oh-won lived in the second half of the 19th century, and the film follows his life from his childhood as a small beggar boy to his installation as painter for the king. Along the way, we see his relationships with his muse Mae-hyang and other women in his life, his "adoption" of a young beggar boy that reminds him of himself, his battles with more conservative artists and patrons, and his excessive drinking which seems to fuel his artistic prowess. If this sounds somewhat similar to Pollock, the bio-pic of Jackson Pollock starring Ed Harris, you'd be right. But the problem is that it sounds like every other artistic bio-pic as well. The genre is so rigid that even transporting it to 19th-century Korea only changes the frame on an otherwise copied painting.

No one can match Im's spectacular use of color. Working again with cinematographer Jung Il-Sung, he creates compositions of exquisite and startling beauty. His landscape shots of a forest or marsh are stunning, using reds, grays, and greens in gorgeous counterpoint. Unfortunately, the movie is in such a hurry to move on to the artist's next big event that we're never given enough time to adequately savor what's on screen. Furthermore, Im's pairing of Oh-won's paintings with his own cinematic paintings seems obvious, with little true insight given into how an artist works. Maybe Chi-Hwa-Seon packs more emotional punch in its native Korea, where Oh-won is a venerated artist and where the brief allusions to Korean history might carry more weight. Here, it feels like a familiar story dressed up in beautiful colors. 

One of my favorite movies of 1999 was Ken Loach's My Name is Joe. After taking a detour to Los Angeles with Bread and Roses, Loach has returned to his usual Glasgow with Sweet Sixteen. This also won a major award at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and unfortunately, like Chi-Hwa-Seon, strikes me as a less successful follow-up than expected.

The movie focuses on 15-year-old Liam (newcomer Martin Compston). Liam's mother is in prison for a drug offense, and his stepfather Stan and his grandfather are drug dealers. Liam has been able to keep his nose mostly clean, however. And his beloved mother is only a few months away from getting out of prison. But herein lies the problem. Liam has dreams of finally getting his mother away from Stan, but that requires him finding a different place for them to live. He chances on a trailer with a beautiful river view. To get it, though, requires almost ten thousand dollars, and to get that means Liam has to get his nose a little dirty. That turns out to be surprisingly easy, but getting a down payment on the trailer means that he has to keep selling drugs if he's going to fulfill his dream. And selling drugs means he has to face up to Douglas, the kingpin of the neighborhood.

Sweet Sixteen is fantastic in portraying how one small dream and one bad decision spiral downward into much bigger problems. In a way, Sweet Sixteen is the precursor to a movie like My Name is Joe. There we saw a man who's already hit bottom and trying to get his life back together. Sweet Sixteen
shows how a young man hits bottom in the first place. Unfortunately, a man's descent into the depths isn't as interesting as his eventual redemption. Despite Compston's magnetic performance and the compelling relationship between Liam and his sister Chantelle (Annmarie Fulton in a nice role), the movie has the feel of inevitability about it. Many critics had the same problem with Lilya 4-Ever, but there the examination of how economic forces grind a young girl down felt timely and provocative. Here, Loach doesn't examine the societal structures that compel Liam to his unfortunate end, and the movie is the poorer for it. Like Chi-Hwa-Seon, Sweet Sixteen has many strengths but can't measure up to its director's better efforts.  

Chen Kaige's best-known work, Farewell My Concubine, is already ten years old. And his most recent output, an erotic drama starring Heather Graham, went straight to video. So I had few expectations for Together, a return to his native Chinese homeland. Still, it's a disappointing return to the arthouse circuit for Chen.

The movie is designed as an audience-friendly tale of a father and his violin-playing son. The two country beatniks move into the big city in order to pursue their dream. There they meet up with the crusty but endearing teacher, the misguided floozy with the heart of gold, and enough cliches to fill a Hollywood romantic comedy. The movie's first half is charming despite the cliches, but the movie's final 45 minutes are simply terrible. They feel as if they were written using a fill-in-the-blanks screenwriting program, and even the most novice of moviegoers will be able to predict the movie's banal conclusion. That it ends with the teacher and the floozy finding each other (they were young lovers so long ago, of course) and the boy playing to a rapt audience and his teary-eyed father is unfortunately not ironic. My friend Garth once mistakenly derided Chunhyang has a foreign film for people who don't like foreign films. But that's certainly true of Together. Don't bother.  

J. Robert Parks