Many may feel that we’ve forgotten the true meaning of Christmas, but behind the consumerist frenzy aren’t we all just looking for warmth and connection to help us make it through the cold? Well, maybe not, at least as far as one enterprising old man at the centre of Happy Ero Christmas (해피 에로 크리스마스) would have it, but in Korea Christmas is also a time of romance and so our hapless hero hopes to harness the goodwill of the festive season to make this year truly special.
Rookie cop Byung-ki (Cha Tae-hyun) grew up in a hot spring resort famous for its healing waters and inhabited mostly by tourists and gangsters. As a small child dumped by his dad at the baths, Byung-ki suffered a traumatic incident which has defined the course of his life – a horrible gangster decided to throw him into the super hot pool as a kind of hazing exercise, something which caused him both physical and emotional pain. He swore when he grew up he’d get rid of all the gangsters for good, starting with Suk-doo (Park Yeong-gyu) who has a tattoo of the hot springs map symbol but with musical notes instead of steam on his arm.
Unfortunately, however, mostly what Byung-ki does is dress up as the local police mascot “Polibear” and hand out leaflets while taking care of all the other inconvenient station jobs like sweeping the foyer. When he’s not busy dreaming of crime fighting glory, he’s fantasising about the melancholy young woman at the bowling alley, Min-kyung (Kim Sun-a), with whom he’s dreamily in love though she doesn’t seem to know he exists. Min-kyung, as it happens, has hit a rough patch with her fireman boyfriend she started dating when he rescued her from a fire.
Meanwhile, across town, a sleazy old man claims to have discovered the true meaning of Christmas, and it’s X-rated. Rebranding the holiday “Sexmas”, he wants to make an adult movie about a randy Santa who gets kicked out of Santatown for sleeping with all the other Santas’ wives. Coincidentally, the recently released Suk-doo has decided to open a new club, the Sex Palace, during the holiday, while two sexually frustrated teens try to get dates with trombone players and idly fantasise about the abuse of flatfish by sailors at sea.
Suk-doo doesn’t even really remember Byung-ki and is at a bit of a loss as to why he seems to hate him. He spends his life obsessively rewatching Shunji Iwai’s snowy classic Love Letter and getting well and truly into the Christmas spirit to make up for lost time seeing as he spent the last one inside and found it very depressing. Inconveniently for Byung-ki, Suk-doo too develops a liking for Min-kyung after she accidentally spits on him from the roof of the bowling alley after going up there to have a little cry over her rubbish fireman boyfriend.
The thing is, as Min-kyung says, Suk-doo might not actually be that bad. He’s a sensitive soul who knows how to keep Christmas well, which, to be honest is a lot more than you can say for most of the guys in this town. Byung-ki’s efforts to win her heart are so subtle that she hasn’t even noticed most of them, even when he dutifully drops her home after finding her having a drunken karaoke session and she throws up in his police car. Nevertheless, Suk-doo is still a gangster, and gangsters can be awkward too but they’re a lot more dangerous when they are.
Predictably, some of Byung-ki’s most questionable tactics – going through Min-kyung’s bag after it gets left behind in his car when she throws up, quasi-stalking her, putting up a police alarm button right outside her house to let her know he’s only three minutes away etc are written off as awkward goofiness, something which Min-kyung eventually seems to appreciate after realising Suk-doo’s not so nice after all. Suk-doo, meanwhile, gets a sad back story about his mother supposedly dying on Christmas Day, which also happens to be Min-kyung’s birthday, with a series of awkward implications only later undercut by a late confession. As Byung-ki puts it, everyone dreams something special for Christmas be it a weird erotic escapade, or an innocent romance. Mostly everyone gets what they wanted from Santa’s sleigh, riding off into the snow with a new hope for the future whatever that might hold.
Original trailer (extreme low res, no subtitles)
If you think you might have moved in above a modern-day Sweeney Todd, what should you do? Lee Soo-youn’s follow-up to 2003’s The Uninvited, Bluebeard (해빙, Haebing), provides a few easy lessons in the wrong way to cope with such an extreme situation as its increasingly confused and incriminated hero becomes convinced that his butcher landlord’s senile father is responsible for a still unsolved spate of serial killings. Rather than move, go to the police, or pretend not to have noticed, self-absorbed doctor Seung-hoon (Cho Jin-woong) drives himself half mad with fear and worry, certain that the strange father and son duo from downstairs have begun to suspect that he suspects.
Windows on Worlds 