Hyung Bin is finally back on the big screen with romance-drama “I Am Happy”. The last movie Bin made was in 2006 “A Millionaire’s First Love” which is regarded as one of the best Korean dramas ever made.
“I Am Happy” is about two lonely people whose lonely lives crossed in a mental institution and found consolation in each other’s company. Hyun Bin will play the role of Man-soo a man suffering from a mental illness called megalomania or otherwise termed as “delusions of grandeur”, an abnormal behavior that denotes obsession to having/obtaining extravagance and grandiosity. He acquires this psychological disorder after living with his mom with dementia and his older brother, a gambling addict. Man-soo owns a car repair shop in their small town when his gambling brother committed suicide leaving him with a huge amount of debt. Later, his mother loses her memory and her girlfriend left him because of his poverty. He was deeply absorbed in the situation that he locked himself in his room for a couple of days and suffers insanity. He is then sent to a psychiatric hospital where he began to have the delusion that he has become a millionaire and issues blank checks to all the other patients in the mental ward.
There, he admires the head nurse assigned in his ward, Soo-kyeong portrayed by Lee Bo-young, who also have loads of pain from life. She has been taking care of her father with liver cancer who has been sick in the hospital for a long time causing her to incur debt for his treatment, apart from the fact that she also has a terminal-stage rectal cancer.
Knowing the movie plot alone makes me a little depressed. But the movie was based on a novel “Mr. Cho Man-deuk” written by Lee Cheong-joon about a true story he heard from his friend.
According to the film’s director Yoon Jong-chan, he liked the story which talks about a man who goes crazy because he can’t bear the weight of reality, and thought of doing an adaptation of it on film. He was interviewed during their media preview and press conference held last Nov. 13, 2009 at CGV Theatre, Seoul, South Korea, together with the two leads.
When asked, why the title of the film is “I Am Happy” when the characters in the story are far from being happy? Director Yoon replied, “It’s a paradoxical statement, the man is happy because he goes crazy from his miserable life. But I felt that the fact of being alive, just that itself, could be considered a blessing. People who are going through rough times might be consoled after watching the film, especially when they see that the main characters go back to their normal lives after overcoming their difficulties”.
The film was first shown as the closing film at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival held last month, October 2009. It would also be shown in theaters on November 26, 2009, Korea.
Sources: grooveasia.com, hancinema.net, ilove-koreanmovie.blogspot.com
