The Old Jar Craftsman: Choi Ha-won

Choi Ha-won's The Old Jar Craftsman is a luscious, beautiful film that succeeds because of its extreme emotional histrionics, not in spite of them. Based on a short story by Hwang Soon-won, it is more allegory by way of its human characters than merely a fictional tale set in a specific time and place. It reminds me of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) in this regard. The film is about an elderly potter who one day discovers a young woman almost frozen to death in a forest. He saves her life and they eventually marry and have a son. But one day a young man enters their lives...the same young man whom the potter's wife tried to kill herself for. He has been searching for her for seven years and wants her back. He psychologically torments the woman until she runs away with him, abandoning her husband and young son. The potter despairs, has his son adopted by a wealthy family, and kills himself by diving into his kiln. Years later, his grown son visits his father's grave where he discovers that his mother has wasted away prostrating herself there for forgiveness. The two tearfully reconcile. Three things truly make The Old Jar Craftsman shine. First is You Young-gil's cinematography which makes the Korean countryside spring to life in dazzling color and beauty. The second is Hwang Hae's turn as the elderly potter. He is portrayed as a well-meaning innocent for most of the film. Watch how he refuses to sexually assault her when he first rescues her (although the scene where he rubs her frozen body to restore body heat is highly erotic). When he screams that his missing wife deserves to die, we realize that it is the incomprehensible grief talking and not some deep-seated misogyny. For this is a man for whom violence is incomprehensible. The third excellent part of The Old Jar Craftsman is the prolonged sequence where the potter's wife is psychologically tortured by her missing lover. The way Ha-won uses sound to denote psychological torment seems to predict Zhang Yimou's use of the sound of a foot massager in Raise the Red Lantern (1991).

8/10