Red Vacance Black Wedding
Kim Tai Sik, Park Chul Soo
Actor Jo Seon Mook gets to have lots of sex in this Korean doublebill. In Red Vacance, he is a philandering husband who ends up with his wife (Lee Jin Joo) and mistress (Ahn Ji Hye) in the same vacation cottage. A scene of the wife chomping on a cucumber foreshadows what is to come.
In Black Wedding, he is a professor who officiates at the wedding of the student (Oh In Hye) he has been having a torrid affair with. It details an obsessive sexual relationship and makes a mockery of marriage.
The humour is dark and intermittently funny in Vacance, while Wedding is indulgent sexual farce without the laughs.
The doublebill set-up feels like an arch exercise in movie- making for directors Kim Tai Sik (Red Vacance and Driving With My Wife’s Lover, 2006) and Park Chul Soo (Black Wedding and Green Chair, 2005).
It is an in-joke whose punchline is known only to Kim and Park.
(ST)