His insistence on taking care of Jin-kyung's every cancer related problem - from shaving her head to cleaning her when she soils herself, and beyond - could equally be said to be an undertaking of traditional spousal requirements/responsibilities and an - again old school - effort to spare his wife the humiliation and embarrassment of having strangers (i.e. Whether you take this early scene and Sang-moo's individual character arc - subsequent from viewers' perspective but in flashback in terms of actual timeline - as a statement of his yearning to step away from the grinding responsibilities and claustrophobic expectations placed upon him by traditional values (as a man moving from middle-age towards the twilight years of life and, as such, having grown up in a time when traditionalism was instilled from youth to adulthood) by way of his desire to embrace modernity (psychologically) and its personification, Eun-joo, (physically) look at it as a foreshadowing of the desperate subconscious need of an aging man (with prostate problems) to prove his virility and show he's as much a man with sexual desires as he was before life began taking his very manhood away or see it an implication of his awareness (and guilt) of how society as a whole, and his family and peers specifically, would distastefully view someone of his age thinking sexually of a young girl, the underlying statement is the same: Here we have a man who is neither comfortable in the traditional world he came from nor in the modern world his lust for Eun-joo is leading him towards, to the extent that one way or another something will have to give.įollowing the early narrative dream sequence, we are briefly brought to the present day before stepping back in time to watch the unfolding of events that have led to Sang-moo's current situation: His wife is suffering from terminal cancer, Sang-moo has ongoing male medical problems and he is desperately trying to keep some semblance of normality in his life while trying to balance the increasing needs of his spouse with the pressures of his job. For within the sea of traditional, sombre black dress, Sang-moo's gaze focuses on beautiful young woman Eun-joo dressed in brightly coloured, contemporary clothing her character looking every bit as out of place in this traditional setting as the ill ease with which modernity subconsciously sits within the mind of this traditional man whose dream we are watching, Sang-moo.
Everything looks as it traditionally should, all the characters fit perfectly in this seeming picture from a Korea long passed, and it is only when Sang-moo looks behind him to the funeral entourage that the surreal nature of this (soon to be realised) dream sequence becomes apparent.
'Revivre' (based on the story 'Hwa-jang' written by Kim Hoon) begins with what at first appears to be a typically historical Korean scene, prior to the film's present day setting being shown: Sang-moo leads a group of mourners, all dressed in traditional black Buddhist robes, carrying his deceased wife in a carriage to her final resting place.
Not only that, but Im Kwon-taek has regularly used specific characters to stand as either the personification of Korea's past or its present - their individual character arcs standing for those societal shifts - and with 'Revivre' taking place in contemporary Korea, that is very much the case here, too. Throughout his long and illustrious career, director Im Kwon-taek has made the contrast between traditionalism and modernity in Korea and Korean society inherent to many of his (currently) 102 films whether setting timelines during periods of great change (historically) in Korea where the march of modernisation increasingly squeezes traditional beliefs and values almost to almost nonexistence ('Sopyonje', for example) detailing the suffering historically of women/feminism and the male/female balance in what was long a patriarchal society ('Surrogate Mother') or using a present day narrative to show the survival of traditional arts (and indeed values) in an altogether more modern world ('Hanji' etc).