Holiday: Lee Man-hee

It isn’t a requisite to like a protagonist for a film to be great. They can be a bastard. But as long as they're an interesting bastard, we can go along with them. Such is the case with Heo Wuk, the protagonist of Lee Man-hee's Holiday. He’s not a good person. He steals from his friends to finance his girlfriend's abortion and then cheats on her while she is having the operation. But we can get a grasp on his volatile emotions. They don’t excuse his terrible actions, but they do explain them. This film was original made in 1968 but was only released in 2005 because of censorship. It was immediately heralded as a masterpiece. But I disagree. The film is too languid, too morose to be more properly devastating. Many of the shots are curiously over-exposed and washed out. A lot of shots are curiously over-exposed. But I wonder if that was just due to the quality of the copy of the print that I watched (which is somewhat unlikely considering the fact that I watched it on the official youtube channel of the Korean Film Archive). It’s so damn tempting to declare censored, lost, or restored films misplaced classics. But we must guard ourselves against labeling them as such when they might not actually deserve it. And, unfortunately, I think this is one such case.

6/10