They call it 불륜.
It might only mean infidelity, committing adultery. But something that is often lost in translation when dealing with this term is its Hanja counterpart 不倫 -- which opens a monumental can of worms involving not only sociology but also quintessentially Korean customs that date back to the genesis of the Joseon dynasty and its Neo-Confucian DNA. It’s a combination of 不, which indicates negation, and 倫, which depending on its context could mean human relations, moral duty or simply ethics. English’s adultery comes from the Latinadulterium, the contamination of something seemingly pure via extraneous, illicit entities or actions. In this case, the offending parts compromise the “sanctity” of marriage and the family institution through their actions, behavior which nonetheless firmly remains in the realm of individualism – since only the family (or families, if both perpetrators are married) is directly affected.
Yet, the ancient, Sino-Korean foundation of this term doesn’t specifically comment on the illicit sexual intercourse or even the contamination of marriage’s purity which define it in English, but instead takes a broader, less individualistic approach – describing it as defiance against morals so ingrained in Korean society as to deserve to be classified as a sin. Morals which of course are predominantly Confucian. If you look at the Confucian classics upon which prototypical Korean education was based, you’ll find that among the Three Bonds and Five Cardinal Morals (삼강오륜, 三綱五倫) there are two “commandments” that come in handy when talking about the aforementioned social taboo.
부위부강 (夫爲婦綱,Buwi Bugang): The wife serves the husband.
부부유별 (夫婦有別,Bubu Yubyeol): There is a clear distinction between man and wife.
| I wouldn’t want to turn this into a critique of Confucianism’s core fallacies and contradictions, but those eight characters are the very foundation behind the dehumanization of the married woman which has dominated Korean society for centuries. In this environment, marriage -- a social union which supposedly begins with kinship – opens the gates to a lifelong emotional purgatory made of impossibly exacting demands, of codes to observe and rules which must never be broken, lest a single moment of human hesitation might create a social tsunami of epic proportions. Not everyone is cut out for all this, as the increasing number of divorces in the country can prove. It’s almost as if you had to possess certain qualifications before you could marry someone. As if a woman needed
아내의자격(A Wife’s Credentials).
These credentials imply the forsaking of one’s individuality as a woman (something the man only abandons on paper), turning them into a slightly more evolved form of Swedish sci-fi seriesÄktaMänniskor's hubots – you know,
human robots. It’s no longer Yoon Seo-Rae, woman aged 38 with a past as a journalist in the art department – someone with youthful aspirations, favorite movies, songs that made her heart throb, memories of sights and sounds so beautiful that they brought her to tears.
|
She suddenly becomes Han Sang-Jin’s wife, occasional sexual partner and housemaid, not to mention the woman responsible for nurturing Gyeol, the future heir of the “Han Dynasty” – just another upper-middle class clan living in what I not so affectionately often call Gangnamistan, an elusive little chiefdom with its own rules in the fancy heart of Seoul.
Their being upper-middle class is paramount, as it’s actually part of the problem: the higher your social status is, the more attention you’ll tend to pay to the largely obsolete conservative mores which define it, particularly in this social environment. The Confucian social structure cannot help but invite rampant class divide to begin with, and if you couple that with the competitive craze introduced in the 1960’s by the Park Jung-Hee junta, you have legions of
nouveau riche
so terrified of losing their status, they’ll do everything to maintain it. Even if it means robbing human beings of what they used to call life.
Even before she moved to Daechi-Dong, Gangnam’s mecca of private education, and began to experience a bloodthirsty sense of competition between fellow mothers, Seo-Rae was already suffering from the consequences of a rather lackluster marital curriculum – what with coming from a meager upbringing that involved a senile mother and (Mon Dieu) a sister selling side dishes for a living. This included having to endure the dubiously subtle scorn of her in-laws, and the sneaking sensation that having an ordinary background had suddenly become some kind of sin against humanity she would spend the rest of her life atoning for. Even her educational methods are derided, seeing as they cannot be quantified via a short and sweet grade that confronts her precious child with all the other kids surrounding him. Lest, you know, people might start judging him for what he is (a creative and emotionally healthy kid fostered by affection) and not for what he’s supposed to become (a productive member of society who will continue the proud family tradition of being rich and influential).
This all becomes overwhelming, because it robs Seo-Rae of her very existence, her
raison d'être. She sacrificed the prime of her life to foster her son into a caring, tolerant human being, and it turns out that those ten odd years were a failure, all because Gyeol’s math skills are a little funky, and he – God forbid – has yet to read Tolstoy’s
Анна Каренина (Anna Karenina)
despite being already in middle school. Now her decision to stray from the pack and raise her kid in a different way clashes with the sectarian tenets which dominate this small but tremendously influential corner of Korean society. Her family despises her even more than they already were, and she’s ridiculed by her neighbors and alleged peers with that nonchalant, condescending aura of cordiality. She’s almost forty, and there’s no more air to breathe, trapped as she is inside a jungle of soulless buildings that only make the blue sky look a world away.
Enter Tae-Oh.
He’s disarmingly suave and strangely charming in a way that makes all the stifling barriers everyone erects around her vanish. There is no need for duplicity with him, as they can talk adult to adult without having to resort to fluffy conversation whose salient points start and end with status symbols. She once again becomes, in other words, the Yoon Seo-Rae she used to know, before she lost her name and had to conceal her humanity behind a mask called wife, mother, daughter-in-law. It’s a sweet awakening, one which rekindles feelings that remained dormant for years, maybe a decade. She feels like a woman again, and a human hesitation takes her out of that suffocating bubble and back into the light. And here is your tsunami.
For what seems like ages, viewers have been trained to view infidelity on the lil’ screen as a sort of narrative dildo – an artificial device that cannot stand on its own legs, but might bring shallow, ephemeral pleasure. The act itself and its numerous implications are never that important to begin with, it’s the shock value it represents which slowly turned this social taboo into a mere McGuffin. Entire formats have been built around it for decades, such as morning daily dramas, making the riotous excesses of Venezuelan
telenovelassuddenly feel like a subtle Kieślowski
flick. Explaining what led to adultery and its consequences is never too pressing a concern, when all you care about is finding another way to shock the viewers. The louder and more over the top, the better.
But then you’re blessed with something like this, a drama with the balls to see adultery as the starting point of a greater debate on Korean society and not just as a tool to stimulate the viewers’ most visceral instincts.
A show where characters go on pouring their hearts out for five minute long scenes, unabated by nary a single cut or even a brief musical intrusion, as if this were a theater play.
| |
A show which wears extreme realism on its sleeve, knowing that any emotional response is up to the viewer, and that it is something the drama must sincerely earn from him. Not just get on its knees and beg for it with the subtlety of a starving beggar.
There are moments when Ahn Pan-Seok’s masterful camera is so subtle, so unabashedly confident in its script and cast’s ability to deliver, it doesn’t even feel there. The natural lighting, the tiny details that make the apartments, cafes and locations come alive, the time that is given to the actors to breathe life into their characters. It all magically flows together into a breezy, lifelike whole that envelops the viewer like few post-Hallyu dramas have ever done. Subtly buried inside this world are moments of hilarity that never feel forced, immensely poignant scenes that explode in all their emotional power just at the right moment, and then vanish away when their purpose has been fulfilled.
A Wife’s Credentials
is so satisfying an experience, no amount of praise can do it justice, simply because its immense realism and irresistible atmosphere is something you must experience firsthand.
It’s causing quite the interesting stir among viewers as well, and not just because it nearly doubled
빠담빠담(Padam Padam)’s previous record, becoming not only the highest rated show out of all the four new hybrid channels, but basically the top show outside the big 3’s efforts. Perhaps it’s because it speaks to married women in a way that doesn’t treat them like demographic percentile points, by challenging them intellectually and emotionally in an equal way. It does so in such an intelligent manner, even someone far removed from the situation can easily relate to what Seo-Rae and Tae-Oh are going through, simply because the show looks at their predicament with more humanistic sense of objectivity – one which despite strictly adhering to reality is still able to play with it, criticizing its most tragicomic contradictions.
Take, for instance, the increasingly ironic portrayal of the supposedly “perfect” family Seo-Rae escaped from. They’re so-called 강남좌파 (Gangnam Pinko), the Korean equivalent of your average
gauche caviar, limousine liberal,
kystbanesocialist
and what have you – their raging hypocrisy defining them just as much as their lifestyle does. What Jung Sung-Joo does in depicting all these contradictions is not merely hiding a black face behind a white mask, but showing that there are no masks that can hide the fact that everything in life is gray. This is the rare superior show which takes responsibility for every single histrionic it presents you with, and earns those moments every step of the way, never indulging you a second more than it’s needed.
I would praise members of this phenomenal ensemble cast, from Lee Sung-Jae’s best performance in over ten years to Lee Tae-Ran’s subtle touches of weakness finding their way outside the poker face Ji-Seon seems to wear 24/7 – not to mention Jang Hyun-Sung’s deliciously layered elite alpha male, and Kim Hee-Ae’s amazing dualism between conflicted mother and woman rediscovering her youth. But that would single out elements of a whole so organic and cohesive as to appear perfectly put together.
In a 2012 which has so far brought back real sageuk like
무신
(God of War)
and
인수대비
(Queen Insoo),
real home dramas like
곰배령
(The Garden of Heaven)
and real trendy dramas like
난폭한
로맨스
(Wild Romance),
it’s awe-inspiring to see a genre as deservedly maligned as that of adultery dramas finally find a voice, and through what is one of its all time best offerings. It reinforces the notion that when you pour your heart and soul into a production, then no genre will ever need any credentials to stand out from the rest.
http://dramatic.weebly.com/wife02.html
[ 本帖最后由 lovesungjae 于 2012-4-8 10:00 编辑 ] |
发表于 2012-4-8 21:32
