Critics reviews

Im Kwon-taek's Revivre limns the crushing emotional torque on a near-retirement executive with a dying wife and fading future; clearly, Korea is sensing the ache of a population aging on the horizon.

Im Kwon-taek's 102nd feature Hwajang, rather absurdly titled Revivre for export because the Korean title is an untranslatable pun, broaches with astonishing candor the stoicism with which old people must face physical, moral, and intellectual decline.

What makes Im's treatment a little unusual is that the flashbacks aren't presented as Oh's memories. They are rearranged by the narrational authority of the film itself, rather than by situations that provoke Oh to recall this or that incident. We're restricted to Oh's range of knowledge throughout, but that doesn't draw us closer to him. We have to read his mind through his expressions and his gestures, and these are often severely controlled.

Modest and ruminative, the film doesn't have the formal adventurousness of Im's recent period dramas but it exudes a humble and heartfelt wisdom. As enraptured by the young siren as the protagonist, Im's camera is nevertheless squarely focused on human maturity, on how the spiritual illumination that comes with accumulated years is inescapably tied to corporeal indignities.

Even though Im employs nonlinear chronology (the film begins with the wife's death), there's nothing flashy about his directorial approach. What Im ultimately achieves is a "revival" of Hwajang's run-of-the-mill subject matter through an understated formal exactitude, befitting this Korean axiom's 102nd film.