Review: Happiness

One character in the South Korean film Happiness always calls the main character "Cirrhosis." The protagonist's real name is Young-su, but this recurring joke reinforces one of the many questions the film raises: whether each of us is his own disease, the thing that will kill him.

Young-su (Hwang Jeong-Min) is living a fast life and dying a slow death in Seoul, where he's involved in the nightclub business. After staggering through a club clutching his stomach one night, he cashes out and tells everyone he's going "abroad." But where he really goes is a clinic in the country, far from his city friends and influences. There he gradually weans himself from alcohol and cigarettes with the help of the other patients, especially Eun-hoo (Lim Su-Jeong), a young woman who's been there for eight years with a terminal lung disease. Young-su and Eun-hoo fall in love and move out of the clinic to a small house of their own, where they continue to live a simple agrarian life. But there's trouble down the road.

Impending death is a classic trope of melodrama, but in Happiness, it engenders much more than simple sadness. The city's pulsating club scene and the clinic's corny positive-thinking exercises and calisthenics are like alternate conceptions of life itself, of accepting or fighting mortality. Director Hur Jin-ho's condemnation of urban life (he co-wrote the film with three partners) is as harsh as F.W. Murnau's in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. He draws brilliant contrasts between the textures of the two worlds through framing, sound, and pace. But as in that film, it's the people that stand out most, with Hwang and Lim perfectly embodying the dramatic transformations in the main characters.

Happiness is reminiscent of Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life, in which people meet after death in something like a movie studio and help each other recreate the best moments of their lives. Both films suggest that, contrary to Jean-Paul Sartre's grim interpretation of hell, heaven is other people.