Movie rating: 6/10 Neck score: A
I guess you could say this show is painfully funny at times, because it really does capture what life in a small town is like. And this town is way too small. It's either on an island or a tiny coastal town (I don't remember), but it is even further shrinking because the main industry, silverfish fishing, is in decline because all the fish have disappeared. Along with them, all the young people. Especially the young men. This leaves the town with only one eligible bachelor and three girls to fight over him. That is just a recipe for disaster. On top of that, Jae Hwa (Hwang Jung Eum) has become the breadwinner of her falling apart family and she is putting her dreams on her pigs to save them.
The town is so tiny that the rumor mills are crazy. Rumors that Jae Hwa's mom had an affair. I don't know if that is what caused the dad to be drunk all the time, but it didn't help. I was really impressed with the levels of metaphors. The rumors that went around about the mom leading to what happened with the younger generation. Even the connection between her three pigs all being in heat while the three girls in the town were all chasing after that one man. The parallel pregnancies of the pigs and the girls.
Having grown up in a small town, I know that everything is high stakes, because your world is so small that little things become big. I call it the Brigadoon Syndrome (if you remember that musical- Gene Kelley and Cyd Charisse). It was ruined for me as a teenager by my older brother who decided to create a hypothetical situation where our hometown became Brigadoon- meaning that the entire city would be frozen in that current state for forever (because if you leave everyone disappears for forever) and your dating pool would be what you have now, for the rest of your life. He then proceeded to pair me up with all the boys in my grade that I would never date in a million years. Ruined the whole concept for me.
This movie felt that way for me really. Jae Hwa is stuck there because of her family- her father is a drunkard and full of debt. Joon Seob (Lee Jong Hyuk) at one moment expresses the sentiment: why else would I stay here pretending to fish in a sea where there are no fish? Indicating that there was really nothing in the town to make him stay besides her. She keeps putting her family (the real reason she needs to stay) in front of everything else. She is shackled to her town (her Brigadoon) and missing out on the possibilities that leaving could bring. Even running away with the dude to avoid the gossip and rivalry of her two friends (I have no idea why those two girls don't just leave and find a better man).
So for a comedy, the end is really depressing. Being stuck in that town and caught up in that love triangle really ruined her life. Is she the Harry of Brigadoon? The kid who is miserable because he's stuck there? I was always more sympathetic to Harry. Killed because he couldn't stand how unfair his life was because of the "blessing" of being stuck in one place for forever with little chance of happiness. Sucks. Of course, extreme measures that will drag everyone else down with you are never good options, as we see from the ending of My Sister, the Pig Lady too. This was way more deep than I meant this review to be, but since this was a much deeper movie than the previews and synopsis lead me to believe, I had to analyze it more. I didn't hate it, but I wish I had been prepared for a drama and not a romcom. It's not a romcom. It's barely a rom.... But for that small town commentary, it is interesting.
