All Slights Deserved

Although regarded by some as South Korea's finest ever film, Obaltan is very much a product of the changes cinema underwent across the world in the post-war years. Fittingly therefore it's a film about readjusting to civilian life after wartime, although here the war in question is the military conflict that shook Korea between 1950 and 1953. Falling somewhere between The Best Years of Our Lives and the plaintive bleakness of Italian neorealism, it relates the story of two brothers who live in poverty in the ravaged slums of Seoul. The elder, Yeong-ho (Kim Jin-kyu), works for a pittance as an accountant to support his wife and young children whilst tormented by chronic toothache. His younger sibling Cheol-ho (Choi Mu-ryong) is a former war hero who spends his time hanging out his fellow veterans and promising, but always failing, to find a job. As events progress things go from bad to worse for the brothers. Cheol-ho is reunited with a nurse who treated him in hospital a...