Sexual repression and rigid patriarchal social codes slowly dissolve a "normal middle class" family in Im Sang-soo's extremely frank treatise on contemporary gender roles, A Good Lawyer's Wife (바람난 가족, Baramnan Kajok). The Korean title translating as "adulterous family" perhaps hints at Im's winder intentions focussed not only on the role of "wife" but each of those within the family unit which is it seems resistant to change even as the society changes around it, the widowed mother-in-law ironically emerging as the most liberated and progressive of them all.
Hojung (Moon So-ri) may be a good lawyer's wife, but she's also quietly dissatisfied eventually drifting into a relationship with a strange teenage neighbour she caught peeping at her in the nude. Her husband Youngjak (Hwang Jung-min), the lawyer, is a poor lover unable to satisfy her sexually while conducting a secret affair with a bohemian artist with whom he is able to have transgressively kinky sex. The couple have a young son, Soo-in, who is adopted and a little insecure worried that his grandmother doesn't really like him because they aren't related by blood while the other kids sometimes pick on him at school. Grandma Byunghan (Youn Yuh-jung) meanwhile is also having an affair, contemptuous of Youngjak's father Changgeun (Kim In-mun) who has just been told he has only a month to live.
Yet to everyone else the Joos lead "normal middle class life", words Youngjak later uses unsuccessfully to help a woman get off on charges she otherwise admits. It might be taboo to speak of it, but sexual repression seems to be at the root of all their problems or at least an incompatibility between leading a what is conceived as "normal middle class life" and embracing one's sexuality. As good lawyer's wife Hojung remarks to a friend, once you get married "you're not a woman anymore, you're really nothing". As his wife, and as a mother to Sooin, Hojung is no longer perceived as a sexual being by her husband, though as we later discover he remains somewhat passive both with his wife and with his mistress by whom he is penetrated from behind. Hojung meanwhile achieves her only orgasm when positioning herself on top of her inexperienced teenage lover, symbolically if also problematically reclaiming her sexual agency.
Hojung's rebellion also has an ironic quality in that finally restores her maternity as she experiences what she describes as a miracle pregnancy, pointing at the couple's sexual incompatibility as the primary reason they were not able to conceive a child. Even so, the film heavily suggests the cruel and unexpected tragedy which later befalls the family is a kind of punishment for the mutual transgressions of husband and wife as they sought the fulfilment denied to them by the constraints of a "normal middle class life" within the confines of a patriarchal marriage. "If your body wants it, give it what it wants" Byunghan eventually offers when meeting with her lover, declaring herself too old to feel guilty or embarrassed for satisfying her sexual desire while openly contemptuous of her husband with whom it seems she had an unhappy life. "Life's about being truthful to yourself" she explains to her son, finally taking control now freed from marital constraints if ironically immediately considering re-marriage.
Changgeun meanwhile sings North Korean military songs in the operating theatre and as we eventually realise, has no siblings because his mother and six sisters were all abandoned in North Korea where they died. His father escaped with him alone though it appears they are now estranged and it can be assumed that Changgeun's drinking habit which eventually leads to the illness which kills him and destroys his marriage is born of a desire to overcome his guilt and trauma. Changgeun's past too is something which must be repressed, he cannot easily speak of it because of the stigma surrounding his North Korean roots neatly linking back to Youngjak's work with the families of those still looking for loved ones executed during the war quite literally falling into a mass grave in the film's opening. All of these buried truths erode the foundations of the traditional family, yet Im seems to suggest perhaps the family in this form at least isn't worth saving if it only causes people to hurt each other while forced to conform to a series of socially defined roles unable to be their most authentic selves even within a bubble of supposedly unconditional "love".
Trailer (no subtitles)
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