mIRACLE
Type: railway-adolescent comedy
Director: Lee Jang-hoon. With Park Jung-min, Lee Sung-min, Lee Soo-kyung, Lim Yoon-a, Jung Moon-sung
South Korea, 1980s. A rural village forgotten by all sees the trains whiz by but they don’t stop because there is no station. And so a student never tires of writing to the Korean president to request its construction, given that he, like all the villagers, has to cross three tunnels and as many viaducts walking on the rails to reach school or work places, with the risk of be overwhelmed.
This is the actual cue of Miracle (the story of Korea’s first “private station”, that of Yangwon) but the film, winner of the Audience Award at the last Far East Festival, digs deeper into the contradictions of this protagonist, as brilliant in mathematics and physics as complexed and repressed in human relationships.
Park Jung-min and Lim Yoon-a in a scene from “Miracle” by Jang-hoon Lee
And he does so with a delicate and incisive humour, capable of passing from the comedy of manners to adolescent melodrama, from the sociological cross-section (how much damage does the need to “obey orders” do in Korea?) to the cult of the dead. An unusual and surprising film that mixes an original youth training path (thanks to a decidedly uninhibited fellow student) with the portrait of a country of a thousand contradictions.
For those who want to discover the fragility of a complex country like South Korea.
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