The Housemaid: Cheating on Your Wife Means Gambling With Your Life

Checking references for a potential domestic hire? If the candidate's name is Myong-ja (Lee Eun-shim), be sure to talk with her former boyfriend as well as her recent employers. This girl's got serious jealousy issues! In Kim Ki-young's kooky melodrama The Housemaid, all hell breaks loose when this saucy servant starts cooking and cleaning... then screwing the master-of-the-house -- a music teacher named Dong Sik (Kim Jin-kyu) who leads a women's choir at the local factory. What's the best way to deal with her irrational behavior? Try to kill her off with the same rat poison she used to kill your bratty son (Ahn Sung-kee) and you'll end up like Dong's wife (Ju Jeung-nyeo ): a slave to her sewing machine and Myong-ja! Try to defuse her when she explodes and you'll end up like Miss Cho (Eom Aeng-ran): at the wrong end of a very long knife! Whatever you do, don't continue to sleep with her!!! In this movie's crazed reality, Dong Sik's last-ditch attempt to get away leads to his loony lover being latched on to his ankle and bumping her head against every stair along his failed escape. As black-and-white middle-class tragedies go, this one is campy, corny and not too credible.

Seong Chun-hyang: Hey Sweetheart! It's Easier to Die for Love

I think you could safely call Seong Chun-hyang a tragedy. For while the title character (played by Choi Eun-hie) does end up with the governor's son (Kim Jin-kyu), she nevertheless suffers through a number of brutal beatings and more than a few days in the stocks before she gets him. Her final reunion with the careerist husband who deserted her doesn't feel romantic. It feels like a marginal improvement over the decapitation she would have undergone if he hadn't come back to town. As happily ever afters go, Shin Sang-ok's paean to purity conforms strictly on superficial grounds. She sacrifices selflessly for him; he comes across as a self-absorbed jerk. This imbalance allows the director to take a sadistic pleasure in documenting the price that comes with living a virtuous life—made especially difficult since her mom's a locally famous whore. It's a theme Shin and screenwriter Lim Hee-jae would visit again (and more effectively) in My Mother and Her Guest. That's not to say Seong Chun-hyang isn't good. It is. Very much so. And with its gorgeous costumes in eye-popping yellows, pinks and greens and lighting effects in even more-lurid shades, Seong Chun-yang is never dull to watch. Someone should turn it into a musical.

Deaf Sam-ryong: He Can't Hear You Say Stop Loving Me

People say you can make your own family but I don't know. I think you're pretty much born with whatever it's going to be and that the best of everyone else is just really good friends if you're lucky. You can't make someone a blood relative aside from marriage. From the looks of Deaf Sam-ryong, director Shin Sang-ok agrees with me. His effective weepie about a servant (Kim Jin-kyu) with no hearing and only half a brain shows that you can be the best-behaved son to the man you wish were your father but he'll always choose his own offspring first, and that you can be the most chaste, self-sacrificing idolizer of a well-bred lady (Choi Eun-hie) but she'll always side with her husband even if he beats her and sleeps with the maid. Maybe if this surrogate son/lover wasn't such a simpleton that wouldn't be the case but poor Sam-ryong has only the cards he's been dealt by life and those add up to a losing hand. Although his performance is painfully over-the-top, Kim creates a sympathetic character eventually. I guess you can't be this downtrodden and not merit a handful of hankies. Choi, for her part, must be credited for keeping a straight face during Kim's shameless mugging.

My Mother and Her Guest: The High Road Leads to Heartbreak

On paper, mother (Choi Eun-hee) isn't such a great catch. She's sexually repressed, she beats her daughter, and she's so old-fashioned that she's afraid to get her hair styled in a modern cut. Even with all these shortcomings, however, you secretly hope the 28-year-old widow will somehow climb out of her suffocating shell and forge a romantic relationship with the dashing boarder (Kim Jin-kyu) who's shacking up with her, her daughter (Jeon Yeong-seon), and her mother-in-law (Han Eun-jin). Plenty of opportunities present themselves thanks to the conniving of her child, an adorable tyke who takes great pleasure out of telling little lies that add to the drama of the household. Love letters lead to a single encounter at the family well where you think the roomer and the widow might finally kiss but he's been out on a bender so she can't bring herself to taste his liquored breath. It's a night of hugs! She's a woman of principle! This is not a romantic comedy! In melodrama, the only chance an upstanding woman has at getting married depends on shame. That certainly worked for her maid (Do Geum-bong) and an egg vendor (Kim Hee-gab) who end up getting hitched after he got overly intimate with her eggs one afternoon. Chastity is a source of pride not happiness in this memorable film from director Shin Sang-ok.

Stray Bullet: The Story of an Aimless Life

It's not enough to be burdened with a prostitute sister and a shiftless war vet of a brother (Choi Mu-ryong). No. Stray Bullet's protagonist (Kim Jin-kyu) has to have a crazy mother, two hungry kids, a pregnant wife (Moon Jeong-suk), and a nagging toothache too. Akin to Italy's postwar neorealist films, Yoo Hyun-mok's black-and-white, working class drama illustrates with quiet poignancy that you may follow the precepts of Confucius and be the good son, the good husband, the good father, and the good worker and still end up with a fairly shitty life. When you're poor, taking the high ground of self-sacrifice means being one small step from the gutter. Given its strong social realist message, you'd almost think that Stray Bullet was a product of North Korea. But it's hard to imagine that country's movie industry telling this downer without an uplifting Communist coda. There's no propaganda here. Instead, witness the chilling scene in which the son, a paperboy, is seen running with a stack of today's news, the cover of which is a crime committed by his uncle. The downtrodden must capitalize even the darkest of moments. When life's anything for a buck, your conscience is a cage.