Cha Young-Goon’s family has a history of mental problems. She becomes convinced that she is a combat robot and has to be committed. The doctors desperately try to get her to eat something, but she just wants to lick batteries and watch her toes light up. She meets a masked kleptomaniac who steals her panties and tries to trick her into eating.
There’s a pair of moments in this one that touched me like nothing I’ve seen in any other recent romantic comedy. I can’t give specifics because I wouldn’t want to spoil this for any of my 4 1/2 readers, but one of them involves a cork and the other involves a door. There’s another scene with a yodeling Japanese guy that also nearly made me weep.
As did the line “A cat is, above all, a furry animal,” a bit of dialogue that probably is funnier in context. This has a free-flowing cuckoo vibe, and people will call it a Japanese One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a movie that some people refuse to even watch because it beat an inferior Jaws for Best Picture. The craziness is movie craziness with an asylum that wouldn’t actual exist outside of the screen. You get characters with silly mental disorders probably used for comic purposes.
They color the movie but don’t really serve any real purpose, at least regarding the plot, until another kind of touching moment that takes place in a cafeteria. You get a guy who walks backwards, a woman who can only look at people in a mirror, and a variety of other characters humorously sick in their heads. I liked how this one was filmed, flamboyantly and with almost a French whimsy. It breezes on by, and although it’s never really all that profound (it is, after all, a romantic comedy), it’s a cute little story with some beautiful visuals. I might be in the minority here, but I prefer this one to Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy.