The movie was great also: it’s side-splittingly hilarious but also has a heart, and was a surprise hit in Korea.
The first thing I have to say is that someone at Nongshim (a Fantasia sponsor and notable manufacturer of instant noodles) has clearly been reading my columns, particularly the one about craving noodles after seeing so many Asian films. And why do I say that? Because everyone in the audience for the South Korean comedy Miss Granny got a free package of Nongshim noodle soup to take home (I got spicy kimchi flavor, yay!). That’s what I call a company who knows its market.
The movie was great also: it’s side-splittingly hilarious but also has a heart, and was a surprise hit in Korea. Oh Mal-soon (Mun-hee Na) is an 74-year-old lady with a lot of opinions that she doesn’t mind expressing—she’s a real survivor and feels she has earned the right to speak her mind, but her family finds her a bit abrasive and annoying. In fact, they are planning to put her in a home for a few weeks so her stressed-out daughter-in-law (who has heart trouble) can have some peace, so she melodramatically stops by a photo studio to have her funeral portrait taken.
The kindly photographer assures her that his photos will take years off her age. He’s not kidding—she emerges from the studio 50 years younger, and, once she recovers from the shock, sets about living life as a carefree young person (now played by Eun-kyung Shim). The first time Oh Mal-soon was young, you see, she was a widow (her husband was a guest worker in Germany who was killed in a mining accident) raising a small child on practically no money, and she didn’t really have a chance to enjoy the freedom of youth.
She takes the name Oh Doo-ri (keeping the same family name while also honoring her favorite movie star, Audrey Hepburn) and takes advantage of her second time around to get a fashionable haircut, buy new clothes, enjoy a little romance, and develop her musical talents as the lead singer in her grandson’s (!) rock band. The grandson is played by real-life boy-band singer Jin Young, and I would swear, based on the roars from the audience, that at least one more K-pop star plays a role in this film. Oh Doo-ri’s musical and fashion tastes are sort of retro, but that helps her separate from the pack and become the very latest thing in Korean pop culture. With her up front, the band becomes a national sensation, but at the same time the contradictions of Oh Doo-ri’s life are piling up. That’s part of what makes the film work—all the time your are laughing at the film’s many gags, you’re also wondering if director Dong-hyuk Hwang will succeed in paying it all off.
Take my word for it, he does. | Sarah Boslaugh
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