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Blue & Orange

Lee Armstrong | Winterville, NC United States | 06/07/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Korean Director Yun-ho Yang was nominated in 2004 for the Tokyo Grand Prix @ the Tokyo International Film Festival for Fighter In The Wind & more recently in 2006 did a film called "Holiday." This film from 1999 was just released in the United States on DVD earlier this year. Gianna Jun is the lead. She won the Grand Bell award in Korea as Best Actress for her role in "The Girl" which was remade into "The Sassy Girl" this year. As Jung-min, she plays a young girl who has dropped out of school. She pretends to be a teacher and has a long-distance pen pal of a soldier. They fail to meet when they first attempt contact. Then Hyun-jun moves into the village. He is a sad man, about 10 years older, whose wife has died. He has a pet shop and scours the city looking for wounded animals to nurse back to life. He sends messages to his dead wife by pigeon that wind up going to Jung-min who begins to reply. The two eventually meet and start a very shy platonic flirtation. He breaks it off, going on to publish a book of photographs while she uses her art work to publish a children's book based on the story of their meeting. Jung-min's past life with a father and mother who died when she was young, the grandfather who raises her and runs a book shop and her inheritance of artistic ability from her father all are part of the back story that is revealed. Yun-ho Yang makes very simple but very interesting use of color throughout the film. We are often in settings like Jung-min's balcony or the park that has part of the screen in blue light with the foreground in orange. The scarf with which the carrier pigeon flies is blue while Jun-min eventually finds Hyun-jun by having the pigeon carry an orange thread across the city. I'm not sure if blue represented the past and orange the present or memory vs. the future, but it is an artistic touch in the film. The film ends with an open ending where you can make your own interpretation of what happened. This is an interesting Korean picture, slow moving but romantic. The actors don't display great depth of emotion, but do a good job. Enjoy!"