Chunhyangdyun

A rapturously beautiful, lyrically dazzling work.

A multi-layered, experimental film, a film about storytelling, but the beauty of it is that it transcends the story at its center while still celebrating the virtues of a tale well-told.

Chunhyang is a movie — and a heroine — for all times.

From the ravishing landscape photography to the exquisite costume design, the entire film is a stunning visual experience; rarely since Hollywood's golden age has the genre been so well served.

The Korean director im Kwon-Taek has made more than 90 films since his first in 1962, and perhaps this explains why his latest, Chunhyang, seems so effortless and masterly. Based on a highly popular eighteenth-century Korean folktale, it's a movie that, stylistically, mixes the traditional with the avant-garde; the narrative may be ritualistic, but there's a let's-try-it-on-for-size friskiness to the filmmaking.

Im's movie approaches a seething, primitivist beauty that evokes Makhmalbaf and parallels the contrapuntal textual investigations of Resnais.

A feast for the eyes. But not, alas, for the ears.