(Okay, I‘m going to need a PowerPoint presentation on this movie‘s plot to be able to understand it. Yes, I'm an idiot...)
CAST: Jung Jae-Lee, Kim Eun-Ju, Mu-saeng Kim, Seung-Yeon Jo, Yun-jae Min.
DIRECTOR: Hyun-Seung Lee
WARNING: Some SPOILERS and migraine-inducing romances straight ahead…
The first sign that IL MARE, our latest Valentine Flick review, is going to be a challenge to watch is the trailer. The first time I saw it, my instant reaction was somewhere along the rational line of “Are you fucking kidding me?” Showing a minute-and-a-half of a chick bawling her eyes out in slow motion and using a letter to, I guess, blow her nose and wipe her tears, the trailer is excellent… if you were to use it as a way to torture someone to get vital information out of them. Forget Chinese-Water-Torture or Sleep-Deprivation - the trailer for IL MARE will get anyone to spill the beans in no time flat.
Then there’s the title, itself: IL MARE. Riddle me this, folks: why the fuck would you use an Italian title for a film set in Korea that has absolutely nothing to do with Italy? See, "Il Mare" means “The Sea” in Italian. Which would be fine, since the movie revolves around a house by the sea. Except that sea is a Korean sea - not an Italian sea. If you were an unwary renter scoping out flicks based solely on their titles, you might be forgiven for thinking this movie was a sequel to the lovely IL POSTINO, AKA “The Postman". I wonder how many folks made that mistake.
Then there’s the premise, which is some credulity-straining pap about a mailbox that can send letters through time, which allows a man and a woman to basically carry on an affair despite the two-year gap in their, uh, time zones. Given this wild premise, the film’s original title of “Siworae” is more appropriate. I guess it’s Korean for “Love Across Time.” Or something.
The point is this: going with this original Korean title instead of the Italian one would have prevented some unwitting Guido out there from seeing the words IL MARE on the Netflix site, thinking it’s an Italian film about fishing, then renting it only to sit through the first ten minutes before mildly commenting : “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS BULLSHIT!?!? WHERE’D ALL THESE VIETNAMESE PEOPLE COME FROM!?!!”
Okay, and for the record? All the Guidos I am personally acquainted with are smart, educated, funny, nice, unique, and talented. But I think if the show JERSEY SHORE has proven anything, it’s that there are several out there who shouldn’t be allowed out of their homes without muzzles - or a chaperone not afraid to use a tazer at the slightest provocation. If any of the special breed of Guidos from JERSEY SHORE end up watching IL MARE by mistake, it could piss them off and set off an emergency of catastrophic proportions - like a nation-wide rash of Gold Chain retail therapy shopping sprees. Fort Knox may never recover. The last thing we need is The Situation creating, uh, a situation.
But I digress. Again. Forgive me. So back to IL MARE and its wacky romantic angle. I mentioned before that it revolves around a Korean man and a Korean woman from two different times corresponding through super-duper mailbox next to a seaside house in - you got it - Korea. The mailbox, apparently, is like some sort of time portal that can send letters from 1998 to 2000 - and back again. Our hero is an architecture student who, in 1998, moves into the seaside house - called “Il Mare” instead of whatever the hell “The Sea” is in Korean. Our heroine is a voice-dubber (look it up - no time to explain because I have to get ready for something) who vacates the house in 2000. She leaves behind a Christmas Card in the mailbox, asking the next tenant to forward her mail to her new address.
If you’re guessing that the “next tenant” turns out to be our architect hero back in 1998, and are puzzled as to how that could be, considering our heroine moved out of “Il Mare” in 2000, all I can say is this: keep a lot of Excedrin nearby - you’ll need it before long. It gets more insane - trust me on that. To wit, our hero and heroine eventually realize the house’s mailbox is some sort of time machine that can send mail back and forth through time.
Before you know it, they’re sending love letters through the fucking thing like it’s some psychedelic/surreal form of email. Riddle me this again, folks: if you found a mailbox that enabled you to send mail to and from someone two years in the future, would you write lovey-dovey shit? Or would you ask for information that is actually useful like: (1) “What stock should I buy?”; (2) “What will the economy be like in two years?”; (3) “What is current hot invention that I can perhaps invent myself and make a bazillion bucks from?”; and - most crucial of all: (4) “Is Russell Crowe still smoking hot?”
I’m thinking you’d forego the lovey-dovey shit in favor of the more relevant stuff I’ve outlined above - especially the last one. Anyhow, what chance in hell does this relationship have, considering they can’t even hold hands? How long can they keep this bizarre arrangement going? And what happens when they agree to look each other up - in their current timezones? Will they recognize one another? Will this affect their “time warp correspondence”? Will my headache ever go away?
If you really want the answers to the above, see the movie. But get that Excedrin ready…
BUT, SERIOUSLY: Folks, I really wanted to like IL MARE more than I did. While the “time warp love” angle echoes semi-classics like SOMEWHERE IN TIME and THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE, IL MARE’s execution of this premise is just not powerful enough. In fact, the 2007 America remake, THE LAKE HOUSE, starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves actually works better. Usually I find myself favoring the foreign originals over the local remakes, but that is not the case with this movie.
Events unfold in such a confusing way that it’s hard to keep straight the sequence of events and timelines. Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe the script just needed another rewrite. In any case, the overall effect is a bit underwhelming. The leads are okay, but the relationship between their characters never ignites, and therefore we never have compelling reason to want to see them surmount their separation through time. The film is certainly beautiful to look at, but there really isn’t much under the surface to make this rise above the average mark.
I’ve found the best love stories are the ones that are understated and subtle. IL MARE starts out along those quiet lines, but then gets maudlin and overly heavy-handed, especially with the constant use of that sappy love song. Clearly, the film was successful enough in Korea and other Asian countries to warrant an American remake. The central idea, while a bit confusing, is not without value. It was just not handled assuredly enough in IL MARE. Fortunately, it was in THE LAKE HOUSE.
In the end, IL MARE is a well-intentioned but muddled valentine to star-crossed love. But the simple fact is there are much better valentines of this kind out there…
