Subtitles:

English, none

Extras:

• New video interview with Lee (24:33)
• On the Set of “Secret Sunshine,” a behind-the-scenes video piece featuring interviews with actors Jeon Do-yeon and Song Kang-ho (6:46)
• U.S. theatrical trailer (1:12)
• 20-page Liner notes booklet featuring an essay by film critic Dennis Lim

Secret Sunshine, while being no exception to this model, differs from its predecessors by burying its fomenting despair within a more mundane narrative; gone is Peppermint Candy's backward chronology and Oasis's digressive flights of fancy. Instead there's Jeon as Shin-ae, a single mother moving into the conservative hometown of her deceased husband, seeking to start a new life with her young son and a modest living as a piano teacher. Her awkward streak becomes apparent when she makes pleasantries with a local shopkeeper only to bluntly criticize the shop's drab decor. Instances of petty improprieties only accumulate, building a sense of peripheral menace all the more unnerving for being unattached to any overt foreshadowing of things to come. This is possibly the best hour of filmmaking in Lee's career to date.

“Secret Sunshine” — a 2007 film by Lee Chang-dong now making a tardy but welcome American debut — takes place in a South Korean town called Miryang, described by one of its residents as “just like every other place.” This is true enough, and Mr. Lee is certainly attentive to the routines and rhythms of everyday life. But there is nothing ordinary about this movie, or about the story it tells.

On its surface the transparent and horrifying tale of a mother’s grief, “Secret Sunshine” has the kind of emotional depth and thematic complexity that rewards repeat viewings. Mr. Lee, a distinguished novelist before he turned to filmmaking (he has also served as South Korea’s minister of culture and tourism), composes the cinematic equivalent of prose that is clear, elegant and lyrical. The experience of watching his films is not always pleasant: more than a few scenes in “Secret Sunshine” (and in the more recent, equally amazing “Poetry,” a highlight of this year’s New York Film Festival) are excruciating in their raw depiction of souls in torment. And yet his quiet and exacting humaneness infuses even the most dreadful moments with an intimation of grace.

Gary Tooze

August 15th, 2011