<The Oldest Son (Jangnam)> (1984)

Director : Lee Du-Yong
Production Company : Tae Heung Films Co., Ltd
Date of Rate : 1984-11-20
Date of Theatrical Release : 1985-06-22
Running Time : 115 min.
Opening Theater : Dan Seong Sa Theater
Genre : Social Drama

Staff :
Writer : Ahn Jin-Won
Screenplay(Adaptation) : Ahn Jin-Won, Lee Du-Yong
Producer : Lee Tae-Won
Director of PhotoGraphy : Jeong Il-Seong
Gaffer : Cha Jeong-Nam
Music : Lee Cheol-Hyeok
Art Director : Do Yong-Wu

Cast(Actor/Actress) :
Hwang Jeong-Sun, Kim Il-Hae, Shin Seong-Il, Tae Hyeon-Sil

Synopsis

Lee Tae-yeong (Shin Seong-il) lives a busy and demanding life: he works hard to fulfill his responsibilities as the head of technological development at an electronics company, as a father and husband to his family, and as the eldest son to his parents. When his hometown is designated as a soon-to-be-submerged area, his elderly parents (Kim Il-hae, Hwang Jung-seun), who are simple country folk, move in with Tae-yeong in the city. As the eldest son, Tae-yeong is not averse to taking care of his parents, but his wife (Tae Hyun-sil) finds cohabitation with her in-laws discomfiting and frequently clashes with them. When the conflict exceeds a certain level of intensity, Tae-yeong's parents move out of the house and relocate to a piece of land Tae-yeong bought for his entire family to live on someday. The landa vacant lot with a single temporary abode is currently occupied by Tae-yeong's youngest brother. When he gets married, Tae-yeong's parents are once again left forlorn. For their sake, Tae-yeong begins construction on the family home earlier than was originally planned, leaving his troublemaking younger brother Ban-yeong (Kim Hee-ra) to oversee its progress while he goes to Jeju Island on important business. Tae-yeong's parents come to the site everyday, contentedly watching the building of their future home. One day, with the dream house that will gather the entire family under one roof nearing completion, Tae-yeong's mother suddenly passes away. Receiving the sad news in Jeju, Tae-yeong rushes back home and laments that his mother did not wait for him to be a better son to her.

Notes

"A moving testament to the decline of the extended family" (Kim Young-jin)
The subject of The Oldest Son is the conflict between parents, who join their children in the city after being driven out of their home due to development, and children, who are suddenly called upon to take care of them may be a hackneyed one. Such a subject has been recycled continuously in countless Korean soap operas; one can easily assume that it will typically involve the inevitable clash between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law as well as veiled infighting among the children, who are hesitant to take on the responsibility of caring for their parents. However, The Oldest Son does not allow for such pat typicality. The movie's greatest strength is the complexity of the characters that carry its storyline. Tae-yeong's younger brother is an incompetent blowhard who hits his wife yet is intensely devoted to their parents; the individualistic youngest brother harbors resentment toward his siblings for not taking proper care of their parents; Tae-yeong's two sisters, who are unable to take their parents because of their own difficult circumstances, entrust everything to their eldest sibling and resort to grumbling from time to time. These are not last-minute concoctions made to fill out the cast of a TV soap, but utterly realistic characters who have, at the very least, genuine feeling toward their parents. Even Tae-yeong's wife, who occupies the role of main villain in the film, is not a bad person at heart; she is merely another victim, buffeted by the demands of her life as the eldest daughter-in-law in a large family. Because the discords occur in an ordinary extended family whose members exhibit average to above-average devotion to the parents, the movie is able to portray the dissolution of the family a reality threatening Korean society at the time with great credibility. In sum, it suggests that the disbanding of the traditional extended family is not the result of an attenuation in the filial devotion of children but rather the tragic consequence wrought by the inescapable rigors of life and the clash of human desires, and, as such, not something that the younger generation can remedy through individual effort.
The movie also presents the family's internal discord through the subjective gaze of the elderly parents: one example is the scene in which the exaggeratedly-fast cars on the roads and the harsh sounds made by them are dizzyingly overlapped through the eyes and ears of the father, who has been a farmer all his life. Such devices clearly demonstrate that the parents, whose entire existence was defined by their rural surroundings, cannot adapt to life in the city despite the presence of their devoted children. This is doubly emphasized by the fact that these are people who have been driven out of their natural environment by the encroaching shadow of development. For the parents, who have no future to call their own, death is an inevitable consequence; the eldest son's dream of getting his whole family under one roof in the city is a mere fantasy. This is the movie's overarching message. In this sense, The Oldest Son is probably the most coldly objective family drama in Korean cinematic history.

Director Bio: Lee Du-yong (1942- )

Born in 1942. After making his directorial debut with The Lost Wedding Veil (Ilh-eobeolin myeonsapo), he continued to make many films in a variety of genres including action films, melodramas and period films and achieved success with his hit Imbecile (Dol-a-i) (1985) series of action films. He received international recognition for his films that dealt with the plight of women in the Confucian and patriarchal Korean society, receiving the Special Award at the Venice Film Festival for The Hut (Pimag) (1980) and the Prix Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival for Spinning, the Tales of Cruelty Towards Women (Yeoinjanhoksa mulreya mulreya) (1983). His other important works include Eunuch (Naesi) (1986), The Oldest Son (Jangnam) (1984), and Road to Cheongsong Prison (Cheongsong-eulo ganeun gil) (1990).