A lonely bank clerk dreams of married bliss but ignores a promising match right under his nose in Park Heung-sik’s offbeat romcom, I Wish I Had a Wife (나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다, . As much about the loneliness and serendipity of city life at the turn of the century, the film takes its time in bringing its two leads together while subtly filling the air with a deep sense of melancholy uncertainty as each attempts to process their deep-seated childhood trauma.
Both Bong-soo (Sul Kyung-gu) and Won-ju (Jeon Do-yeon) are each in their way arrested in childhood have not yet really fully grown up despite being fictional adults with jobs and responsibilities. Bong-soo’s sometime girlfriend, with whom he first reconnects while she’s attending a funeral, remarks that he hasn’t really changed since they were at school though she has been married and divorced. Having lost his mother as a small child, at least part of Bong-soo’s desire to be married seems to have to with searching for a maternal connection and wanting to be taken care of. When the train he is on breaks down and he’s stuck in a tunnel in the dark for over an hour, it saddens him that unlike the other passengers he doesn’t have anyone to call. No one is immediately worried him, nor can he ease his own anxiety by hearing a familiar voice. Though his friend and roommate Hongtak (Seo Tae-hwa) says he could have called him, Bong-soo didn’t want to. He wanted this specific connection with a woman rather than the brotherly camaraderie he has with Hongtak. Nevertheless, he’s irritated when he realises that Hongtak, a confirmed bachelor, is going to get married before him.
Won-ju similarly lost her father in childhood and is also to some extent looking for a reliable male presence which is something she detects in Bong-soo with his dull if stable position at the bank. Like him, she is likened to a child and often depicted on an equal level to those she teaches at the school opposite where Bong-soo works. She finds one of the little girls she teaches crying in the classroom because the other kids said she looks like her and turns it around saying she’s flattered to be compared to someone so pretty before pointing out that it’s probably because they have a similar hairstyle. Won-ju still wears hers in a youthful way that that adds to her air of unsophisticated innocence which stands in strong contrast to the earthy sexuality of Bong-soo’s childhood friend Tae-ran (Jin Hee-kyung).
Like a child, she tries to ask Bong-soo out through a cutesy manoeuvre by using a paying in slip as a confession letter, but he rejects her in an overly harsh way by typing his reply on a receipt and reprimanding her for not taking banking procedures seriously enough. Even so, like many similar films of their era their romance is facilitated by the new technology of video as each is seen to talk into security as a way of communicating with themselves or delivering a message they don’t really intend to be delivered. Bong-soo also does this through the video diaries he records for his future wife, though why he thinks she’s want to watch hours of his monologues is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, it’s not until he sees Won-ju’s speech to the ATM security camera that he begins to take her seriously as a romantic prospect despite the video not picking up any sound.
After his relationship with Tae-ran ends badly, Bong-soo gives up doing his magic tricks and becomes cold and cynical, swearing off romance and closing himself off from the serendipity of city life. He might have found Won-ju’s ditsyness irritating with her tendency to drop her change and generally get into some kind of amusing mishap, but later warms to it after seeing her from another angle through the CCTV footage at the bank. Even so, she is not unaware in the irony of Bong-soo’s desire for “a wife” while idly exclaiming she’d like one for herself while Bong-soo points out that what she’s describing is basically a slave which is how wives have been seen even if he insists it’s not that way anymore. Their view of romance is therefore more clear-eyed and realistic, and in its way magical as the edge their way out of monsoon into the relative serenity of the autumnal skies.
Windows on Worlds 