Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Wedding Campaign- Korean

When we lived in Gurgaon between the late nineties and the mid-2000s, I had a Bengali cook. She was a widow. Apparently she'd been married off to an aging Haryanvi. Although she had no complaints about her in-laws and stressed that she only took on such work to pass the time of day, her story opened my eyes to this sort of marriage in present day India.
We are told, time and again, by the media that the Indian sex ratio is very skewed. While the major blame for this has been laid at the doorstep of supposedly traditional practices like female foeticide, I have heard of other explanations. Be that as it may, I was curious to look at a film from another country which talks about a shortage of women.

The film is a little slow to begin with but that is not, in itself, a major put-off. There is a lot of tenderness, a pace of life so far from the rat race that there is time to chew on a straw and gaze at faraway hills. A farmer, in his late 30s, living with his mother and grandfather, finds that he has to go to Uzbekistan if at all he is to find a bride. And so he and his best friend set off and the film's pace picks up for a while.

We are deeply moved by the naivete of this man as is the heroine although she is struggling with her own issues. There are cinematically breathtaking moments throughout.

Which is why the end is rather abrupt and I wonder why it had to be so.  

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