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- THE FACE READER
- by Pierce Conran / May 26, 2020
2013 | 139 MIN | Epics/Historical, DramaDIRECTOR HAN Jae-rimCAST SONG Kang-ho, LEE Jung-jae, BAEK Yoon-sik, JO Jung-suk, LEE Jong-suk, KIM Hye-sooRELEASE DATE September 11, 2013CONTACT ShowboxTel +82 2 3218 5500Fax +82 2 3444 6688Email sales@showbox.co.krJoseon Era royal succession dramas are exceedingly common in Korean cinema but sometimes all it takes is a fresh and confident approach to remind viewers why the format is so popular to begin with. HAN Jae-rim’s third film The Face Reader (2013) is just such a work, an engrossing yarn with a great cast and superb production values that was a monster success during the Chuseok holidays, welcoming over nine million viewers. Yet what sets the film apart is its unique and very local subject matter, involving a man and his prized ability to read people’s fortunes in their faces.Kim Nae-kyeong (SONG Kang-ho) is a prodigious face reader who lives out in the countryside with his trusted brother-in-law (JO Jung-suk) and son (LEE Jong-suk). Yeon-hong (KIM Hye-soo), the madam of a popular courtesan house, seeks him out and pulls him out semi-retirement to work for her reading people’s faces in the city. Before long Nae-kyeong winds up solving a murder with his skills and this attracts the attention of Vice Premier Kim Jong-seo (BAEK Yoon-sik), who enlists him to sniff out a traitor in the king’s midsts, whom he believes to be the nefarious Prince Suyang (LEE Jung-jae), the king’s brother. Nae-kyeong earns the king’s trust and just before his death, the ailing monarch charges him with protecting his young son, who is next in line for the throne, from the traitors in their midsts.When Yeon-hong first meets Nae-kyeong, who has just woken up with a hangover, she bears witness to his extraordinary ability to suss people out just by looking at them, in a scene that instantly calls to mind Sherlock Holmes, while his brother-in-law could easily be a stand in for Watson. Yet while Holmes divined his theories from pure logic and visible evidence, Nae-kyeong’s observations come from his knowledge of physiognomy, and not only is he able to guess people’s characters, he can also perform fortune telling.This ability to divine the future and the period setting formed the basis for a trilogy of films and The Face Reader was eventually followed by the thematically similar but narratively unconnected The Princess and the Matchmaker (2018) and FENGSHUI (2018), both also taking place in the Joseon Era.SONG excels as Nae-kyeong, a character who resembles his iconic Detective Doo-man in Memories of Murder (2003), with the crucial difference being that while both look deep into people’s eyes to figure them out, Nae-kyeong is actually successful in doing so. 2013 proved to be a major year for SONG, following a brief fallow period, as he starred in three films that soared over nine million viewers, with Snowpiercer (2013) coming a month earlier and The Attorney (2013) following at the end of the year. While the whole cast shines, LEE Jung-jae in particular was also singled out for praise for his menacing, gravelly-voiced antagonist Prince Suyang.The Face Reader (2013) was a critical hit as well as a commercial one, triumphing at the 50th Grand Bell Awards, where it won Best Film, Best Director for HAN Jae-rim and Best Actor for SONG. Director HAN and SONG previously collaborated on the gangster drama The Show Must Go On (2007) and are about to go into production on a third team-up, the aviation disaster drama Emergency Declaration (translated title).
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