Written by Yeo Ji-na, Kim Eun-jung, Kim Mi-yeong, Wona Tae-yeon
Starring Jun Ji-hyun and Lee Jung-jae
South Korea, 2000
The premise to this time travel story might sound familiar to you: a woman in living in the present and a man living in the past, separated only by a few years, find they're able to communicate with each other through a seemingly magical mail box located at a house by the sea she just moved out of and he just move into.
Communicating, seemingly impossibly, through time, they begin to fall in love with each other, try to figure out ways to meet, find it's more complicated than they realize, and then attempt to exploit the time traveling letters to try to change their pasts or learn about their futures.
If this sounds familiar it might be because you saw the American remake, THE LAKE HOUSE, with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. I've actually never seen that movie, but I guess I remember enough of the advertising to feel like this premise seemed familiar to me.
This original version is pretty good -- it might be a little overdone in places, but hey, it's about how love crosses the gulf of time, so you can excuse it a little. Ultimately the time travel rules aren't totally figured out, because although the ending is sweet, and sort of inevitable, it does make you wonder -- if this really happened, how come she doesn't remember it? The movie tries to have it both ways with causality and predestination -- if you travel through time, can you change the course of history, or by the nature of time, has everything that's going to happen already happened, and there's no way to change it?
Of course the answer is that there is no answer. So you can't really fault the movie for not having one.
No comments:
Post a Comment