Apparently the third in a series of films about newcomers adapting to life in the big city of Seoul, Dance Town examines the difficulties faced by Jung-nim Rhee (newcomer Mi-ran Rha), a middle-aged North Korean housewife who flees Pyongyang for the South at the behest of her husband, a businessman whose travels have allowed him to establish connections beyond The Hermit Kingdom's borders.Jung-nim makes it to Seoul with relative ease, but difficulties begin immediately upon her arrival. After enduring a grilling by South Korean intelligence agents intent on winnowing out Northern spies from genuine refugees, she's granted citizenship and lodged in an apartment equipped, ironically, with spy cameras and a tapped telephone. No longer financially supported by her beloved husband, she's forced to take a job at a laundry and gets noticed by a policeman whose intentions are less than honorable.
Produced after South Korea's conservative government ended the country's Sunshine Policy, which allowed for some business and cultural relationships between the two Koreas, Dance Town insistently suggests that, though there are differences between North and South, they're not irreconcilable — and don't always redound to the South's favor. It's definitely a film that falls at the inclusive, 'liberal' end of the spectrum: as one of Ms. Rhee's laundry colleagues suggests, "kimchee is kimchee", no matter on which side of border it's made.
Though slowly paced, the film is never less than engrossing, and Rha is utterly convincing as the stranger in a strange — yet strangely familiar — land. Dance Town is the best film I've seen so far in 2011, but be aware that it features a surprising amount of quite graphic sexual content, not all of it consensual.
Produced after South Korea's conservative government ended the country's Sunshine Policy, which allowed for some business and cultural relationships between the two Koreas, Dance Town insistently suggests that, though there are differences between North and South, they're not irreconcilable — and don't always redound to the South's favor. It's definitely a film that falls at the inclusive, 'liberal' end of the spectrum: as one of Ms. Rhee's laundry colleagues suggests, "kimchee is kimchee", no matter on which side of border it's made.
Though slowly paced, the film is never less than engrossing, and Rha is utterly convincing as the stranger in a strange — yet strangely familiar — land. Dance Town is the best film I've seen so far in 2011, but be aware that it features a surprising amount of quite graphic sexual content, not all of it consensual.