A Good Lawyer's Wife (Baramnan Gajok) Movie Review:


A sad tale of marriage lost is the new movie from Im Sang-soo called A Good Lawyer’s Wife. Both the husband and the wife are disconnected and bored with each other, with the husband embarking on an affair and his wife flirting with a teenage neighbour.

Everything is underplayed in this slow, meandering movie full of resolved sub plots and unnecessary extras. The movie continually flirts with other sub plots such as Korean war crimes, a dying father and we never seem to spend enough time on focusing in on why the couple is so disconnected and also why they are embarking on affairs.

There is a shocking twist near the end of the movie that does help in bringing things to a resolution, where they have meandered before. But the set up for this twist is so bizarre and out of the blue and really rather overblown, that it just did not ring true.

The theme of the movie is good in exploring a marriage that is stale, and the movie is very adult in nature, but doesn’t reach an emotional trueness that it could have due to it’s confused nature, the scene when the husband phones his mistress revealing that he wanted to fuck a nurse in hospital as his father was lying on his deathbed, vomiting blood all over him is nothing other than pretentious claptrap. There is a lot of sex in the movie, that some may find too graphic in nature, but is one of the few parts of the movie that works well, conveying the lack of attraction and interest between the couple.

If the director had excised much of the fluff, especially the jarring attempts at comedy, in the movie and pared it down to the heart of the material then it might have been so much more powerful, but instead of feeling much empathy, or even anger (which would have been just as acceptable), we are instead left viewing in disbelief, which is never good.

Gary Gray

Site Contents Copyright© The Z Review, unless used with permission.This site has no intention to infringe on the rights of the film owners of A Good Lawyer's Wife (Baramnan Gajok) and intellectual copyright holders of the movies mentioned herein & hold copyright over the movie, characters, merchandise & storyline.