- K-CINEMA LIBRARY
- Closer To Heaven
- by KIM Hyun-jung / May 23, 2016
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2009|121 MIN | Drama, Romance
DIRECTOR PARK Jin-pyo
CAST HA Ji-won, KIM Myung-min, KANG Sin-Il
RELEASE DATE September 24, 2009
CONTACT United Pictures
Tel : +82 2 3443 8842
Fax : +82 2 3443 4298
Email : up@upictures.co.krPARK Jin-pyo used to be a TV news and information program producer. As if reflecting such career, he has been adept in turning real people and true stories into a film. Too Young To Die (2002) features a real elderly couple, You Are My Sunshine (2005) depicts a love story between a woman in AIDS and a man in a farm village, and Voice of a Murderer (2007) deals with a kidnap case where the victim was found dead, without arresting the criminal.
Closer To Heaven is his first film not to have been based on a true story. However, it is not totally different from his previous works. Although it is fictional, this love story of a man in Lou Gehrig's disease, therefore facing death, and a woman in funeral business, is as desperate as that of You Are My Sunshine.
Jong-woo (KIM Myung-min), a Lou Gehrig's disease patient, remembers Ji-su (HA Ji-won), a funeral business staff, used to live in the same town as him and her family used to run a funeral house, when he meets her to discuss his mother’s funeral. They were once fond of each other and now they fall in love in the hope that they would comfort each other’s suffering. However, their relationship fluctuates between two extremes as his disease becomes worse and worse.
PARK’s trait that this film clearly shows is the blind love story where both parties indulge in and just go for it, and the very intense acting of the desperate characters. PARK always pushes the actors to their limits. The cry from the bottom of their heart is the common feature in his films. Such acting also proves that PARK’s films provoke such extreme emotions from the actors.
Therefore, although lacking a social message unlike his previous works, Closer To Heaven is still desperate, and it is beautiful at the same time. In fact, what PARK focuses on is not a shocking true story itself but the love that it entails, and nothing more.
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