Institute History
Description
If there is a deep, natural connection between wildly different cultures, it is family, an association which audiences the world over identify immediately and strongly if ambivalently. Chul-Soo Park’s zesty Farewell, My Darling provides convincing evidence that large Korean families behave with the same foolishness, grace, lunacy, and odd humor as extended families everywhere.
In Farewell, My Darling, sons (including the filmmaker himself), daughters, brothers, sisters, in-laws, and a bastard, not to mention local politicians, coffee shop waitresses, neighbors galore, and a blast from the past, convene from all over Korea and Chicago to pay their final respects to Mr. Park, an older, but not elderly, man who is now a corpse and celebrate his funeral. According to raucous custom, a celebration, to which it seems virtually everyone is invited, is required to send the spirit of the deceased off properly. There is of course much wailing, some prayer giving, a little fornication, and a tremendous amount of eating and drinking; in the process, relationships are reordered, confessions made, and domestic history reinvented. Farewell, My Darling, at once exuberant and candid, is an astringent human comedy by one of South Korea’s leading filmmakers, whose haunting 301 302 screened at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival.